


Five Years Time

by madness_and_smiles



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-04-11 15:59:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4442060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madness_and_smiles/pseuds/madness_and_smiles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have long lives ahead of them, and the tide of time pushes them together more often than not.</p><p>(Duncan and Methos's relationship told in snapshots five years apart)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. we're going to party like it's 1995

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first time writing for this fandom. I watched the show a lot as a kid but decided to re-watch it as an adult, finished the six seasons in the last couple months of my senior year of college, and now here we are. In literal hell. Anyways, I hope you enjoy.
> 
> Rating may change as future chapters are added.
> 
> (also yes this was inspired by 5 Year Time by Noah and the Whale)

** 1995 **

Light fell softly from a streetlamp onto the steps of the barge, and Methos imagined he could feel the weight of it shift under their four sets of footsteps, although he knew realistically the boat was built to handle at least ten times that amount of people without faltering. He followed Duncan, Amanda, and Joe inside, but paused while the others hung up their coats, unsure of his welcome.

Of course, being unsure of his welcome had never stopped Methos from going anywhere he wanted to go, but one had to at least make a pretense of manners.

“Hang up your coat, old man,” Mac said when he finally noticed Methos’s awkward shifting about. Mac smiled at him, a little awkwardly, and Methos could see the question in his eyes. Maybe you don’t want to stay? Maybe you’re just looking for a chance to leave again? Methos returned the smile slowly, and placed his coat on a peg. Mac seemed relieved.

He noticed Mac’s hands had finally stopped shaking from Kalas’s quickening, which was something.

The four of them had walked to the Quai de la Tournelle together from the Eiffel Tower, fighting the peculiar chill that one could only find on a spring night in Paris. The air promised rain despite the clear sky, and Methos had put his shoulder under Macleod’s arm to support his weight while Amanda held steadily onto Mac’s waist.  The city-wide quickening had taken everything out of Mac, and with every step they took he shuddered with exhaustion. It wasn’t till they were halfway to the quay that he was able to pick up his feet without dragging or stumbling over them. The energy of the quickening had made his skin hot to the touch, and Methos could feel it through both of their coats.

As Mac had gained more of his strength back he gradually pulled his arm away from Methos’s shoulders, while simultaneously holding on tighter to Amanda. Methos knew, of course, that he was only being polite and not trying to take advantage of a near stranger, and that if anything Methos should be glad to give up the burden – Macleod wasn’t exactly skinny. But he wasn’t glad, and some stupid part of him was hurt by the gesture.

Was it jealousy? Maybe. He wasn’t sure. The feeling was only halfway formed, and he didn’t have a word for it just then. But he knew he missed the press of Macleod’s muscles and the warmth of his body as a chill blew through his coat. The way the wind had picked up, Methos now reflected, there’d be a storm overhead by the next day for sure. He glanced at the porthole windows of the barge and idly hoped Mac remembered to batten down the hatches.

The first time Methos had been on the barge he had taken in the details hungrily. He wanted to memorize all of the little scraps and moments that made up the life of Duncan Macleod here in the year of 1995. Every picture, ever bit of cloth, the colors of the wall and the positions of Darius’s chess pieces – all were pieces to a puzzle Methos was desperate to solve.

Now, however, he left the barge alone and focused on the man himself. He had tied his hair back again from where it had fallen out of its clasp, which Methos imagined made Duncan feel like he had a measure of control over himself. It could be difficult to gain, sometimes, after a quickening. His hands weren’t shaking anymore, but dark circles remained under his eyes. He was tired from more than the fight, Methos knew, but Mac still kept his tone light as he bantered with Joe over the diet soda he kept in his fridge.

 “I’m telling you, it’s healthier,” Duncan argued.

“And I’m telling you, it tastes like crap,” Joe teased.

Mac rolled his eyes good naturedly, and then they landed on Methos. His look changed suddenly, and Methos realized belatedly that he had been caught staring. He refused to blush. Mac held his eye for a long moment, half of his mouth ticked up in a lazy smile, and the feeling Methos had earlier returned in full force. The nameless, shapeless wanting he had felt all night – had felt since the moment he had met Macleod, really. Then Macleod turned away and back to the fridge.

“Amanda, have you seen the champagne?” he asked, after emptying out half the fridge.

“In the mood for a celebration?” Amanda asked with the delicate raise of an eyebrow, her voice giving meaning to the word that Methos doubted he had experienced since his senatorial days in Rome. Macleod leaned in and placed a smacking kiss on her cheek.

“Eventually,” he said and his voice was low, and Methos distinctly got the feeling that he wasn’t meant to be a part of this conversation, that this whole moment – that this whole night - weren’t meant to include him at all. He might just be a whisper on the wind of Macleod’s life. A secret to be kept until it was forgotten. It made Methos ache.  “But first,” Macleod said, raising his voice to be heard by all, “I thought we might have a bit of a toast. All together.”

“I’ll never say no to that,” Joe laughed.

“It would only be polite, after we waited in the cold all night to see if you lived or died,” Methos added, flippant just because he could afford to be. Because he needed to be. Duncan nodded in agreement with him and then gave Amanda an expectant look.

“Duncan, I’m sure I would have no idea where your champagne is, so you can stop giving me that look,” Amanda chided lightly, “as if I would stoop so low to steal alcohol from a friend.”

“Let’s not forget the time you stole an entire barrel of wine from me that had cost ten thousand francs in order to appease a duke you were trying to marry – “

“I like to think of that as an early wedding present…”

“Except for the part where you ran off with all his money before the wedding.”

“Anyways,” Amanda said while pointedly ignoring that reply, “are you sure it isn’t in the cooler unit near the bed? You probably put it there for our, ahem, post celebration.”

Macleod gave her a doubtful look but ambled over to the bed, and Methos found himself watching him go. Mac’s energy had come back mostly by now, and there was even a bounce to his step that Methos had never seen before. It wasn’t post-battle giddiness, or the adrenaline rush that comes from a near brush with death. It was something much deeper, and more permanent than that. A bone-deep contentment at being happy and safe and loved. For the moment.

Methos wished that he could come back in a year, ten years, twenty years, and see that same happiness. He wanted to protect it, bottle it, and stick it up on a shelf somewhere out of harm’s way. But that wasn’t the way Immortal lives tended to work out, and Macleod was young yet.

Young and stupid.

“Thank you,” Amanda said suddenly, and Methos turned to see that she had been watching him watch Macleod.

“I think you may remember it was my life on the line, too. Kalas could’ve ruined all of us. I don’t need thanks for saving my own skin.” Methos didn’t want praise. He certainly didn’t want to be treated as if he had something to do with Macleod’s fight on the tower. The idea that he had contributed more than a few careful words of advice made him feel sour.

“You believed in him when you needed to,” Amanda said simply, “I think that helped.” Methos didn’t know what to say to that. Didn’t know how to explain to her just how strongly he wanted to believe in Macleod, and how much that scared him. Didn’t know how to put into words the distance he felt right now and his need to break through it. How watching her and Macleod act like puppies chewing each other’s ears woke up some form of jealousy in him that he couldn’t explain without sounding frankly insane. So instead he was silent.

For a moment.

“Has he always been like this?” Methos asked out of nowhere, not really understanding where the question had come from or even really what he meant by it but knowing that it felt right anyways.

“A gallant, noble, idiot of a highland warrior? Who makes bad jokes and can’t remember where he left the champagne?” Amanda asked.

“If that’s how you want to put it.”

“Then yeah, pretty much,” Amanda laughed, “although he didn’t use to be quite as good in bed. Oh, he thought he was something special,” Amanda said at Methos’s look of doubt, “but no one is born good at it. Really, the sex has been an ongoing four hundred year-long learning process. Of course now he practically has several PhDs in the subject.”

“One of the unknown advantages of immortal life,” Methos said, not entirely able to suppress a smirk. Amanda winked at him, and for a moment the two of them watched Mac as he rummaged in the bedside cooler. After a moment he stood and held up the bottle of champagne triumphantly, his grin crinkling the corners of his eyes.

“He used to laugh more,” Amanda said quietly. Her eyes were soft, and Methos saw such a measure of love in them that he momentarily lost his breath. “He used to laugh more, but you know what? His smile has never changed. Not in four hundred years.” Methos looked from Amanda’s eyes back to Macleod’s smile. Open and honest and lacking any self-awareness. It was a little bit goofy, to be sure, but it sent a warmth right down to Methos’s toes. He felt himself returning it automatically, stretching his lips wide and lighting up inside.

Suddenly, Methos bitterly felt the absence of that smile in the past five thousand years of his life.

That’s what the feeling from earlier was.

Desire and jealousy, yes, but it wasn’t just about romance and it wasn’t really about Amanda at all.

It was jealousy for every moment Mac had lived and Methos hadn’t known him. For the loss of a Scottish brogue that Methos had never heard, and for the way Methos could turn down any street in Paris and face thousands of years of memories without seeing Macleod anywhere.

Methos had never been a big believer in the past, and certainly he of all people knew how pointless it was to regret the lack of one. He had always been striving towards the future – live another day, meet another person, learn another fact. It was big and bold and awaiting him.

And yet he found himself keenly wishing that Macleod had stumbled into his life several hundred years earlier. That Methos could remind him of stolen barrels and petty fights and awkward kisses – the bad memories as refreshing as the good memories in the river of their shared history. He would look at Duncan and know him and Duncan would look back at him and…

“Here we are.” Duncan brought the bottle back and filled up a glass for each of them. Methos jerked slightly back from the sound of his voice, not realizing that Macleod had come so close.

“So what do we drink to?” Joe asked.

“How about the wonders of modern technology?” Methos said, going for humor after a quick glance at Amanda who hadn’t yet completely composed herself, and he wasn’t doing so great either.

“To Macleod,” Amanda said, turning her love from something vulnerable into a beam of support. “Still in one lovely piece.” Methos followed her gaze to the man in question and out of habit did a quick glance over Mac’s body. Still in one piece. Still here. Head firmly attached to his shoulders. The relief at this was so overwhelming that Methos ducked his head to hide a blush.

“I’ll drink to that,” Joe echoed.

“To Fitzcairn and Paul,” Macleod said. The quiet grief in his eyes palpable despite their celebration.

“To old friends,” Amanda said. Methos looked away for a moment, feeling exactly how the phrase didn’t include him and knowing Amanda hadn’t intended anything by it but feeling lost all the same. Maybe Macleod saw that. Maybe he understood a little, because he quickly made the next toast with a look at Methos.

“And to new ones.” There was a moment, just a single moment, where Duncan met Methos’s eyes and everything went a little bit quiet. It lasted half of a second, but Methos could see the opening Duncan had gave him, and he was grateful.

The champagne tickled Methos’s nose, and sparkled pleasantly on his tongue and down the back of his throat until it settled warmly in his stomach. Anything more than cans of cheap beer and practically poisonous vodka had been out of Adam Pierson’s price range for a while now, and Methos wasn’t too proud to release an audible sigh of pleasure at the high quality wine. His eyes flitted around the faces in front of him.

He could get used to this. He could get used to having this.

That was a dangerous thought.

But the thought stayed with him long after he had been politely kicked out of the barge by Amanda and began to make his way back to his apartment. He could get used to this. He wanted to get used to this. Hell, seeing as he had plans to come back tomorrow for another glass of champagne, he had already gotten used to it.

He thought of the silent conversations that passed between Macleod and Amanda, the way they had looked at each other and _known._ Methos hadn’t shared that with another Immortal (with a friend who he couldn’t put a timer on to die) in over a hundred years. He wanted it badly, and against his better judgement he wanted it with Macleod.

A gallant, noble, idiot of a Highland warrior who was better than them all.

“To new friends,” Methos said quietly, the words heard by no one but himself.

As he reached the front door of his building the sky opened up and it began to pour. Methos stepped inside quickly, narrowly missing being drenched by the downpour, and he smiled. Tomorrow he would go back over to the barge for the promised glass of champagne. And after that? Well. They had long lives ahead of them.

Methos knew that Macleod would be a part of his for a while, he would make sure of it. After all, the future was big and beautiful and boundless.


	2. let's all meet up in the year 2000

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Methos was playing his favorite game.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm hoping to space it out about a week between chapters but we'll see if that holds

** 2000 **

Methos was playing his favorite game.

He was currently sprawled across an old lawn chair, baking in the California sun on a lazy afternoon in August. He hadn’t worn any sunblock and he could feel the bright rays of the sun searing his skin red, but he trusted his Immortal healing to take care of it. He glanced at a lizard sunning itself on the rock next to him and raised his beer in a silent salute. The lizard ignored him, which was fair enough.

This was, of course, all incidental to the game Methos was playing.

The game was called “spend as much time away from Duncan Macleod as I possibly can” and Methos was winning. For the moment.

It wasn’t a particularly pleasant game – for all that Macleod pushed, prodded, and rankled him, and didn’t seem to exactly appreciate the wisdom and charm Methos brought to the table, Methos really liked Macleod. He liked talking to him, he liked looking at him, and he liked just being near him.

Methos knew ever since he read Macleod’s chronicle so many years ago that Duncan Macleod would at the very least be affable. Kind, gorgeous, generous, noble, intelligent – that’s all any Watcher had to say about him. Even if the tendency for self-sacrifice had caused Methos to roll his eyes and flip to the next page he knew he would at least get some interesting conversation out of the Highlander.

But the problem was that real life was so much worse than the chronicle could ever have predicted.

Macleod called him by his name far too often and let Methos sleep on his couch and made sushi by hand for dinner. He teased Methos incessantly over beer and sang to himself when he thought no one was listening and smiled in his sleep. Sometimes he turned his big brown eyes on Methos and just looked at him, as if he was waiting for a storm to break on the horizon, and Methos felt his heart skip.

Macleod made Methos question himself, and what’s more Macleod made Methos question _Macleod_. He was dangerous and predictably noble and by now he was Methos’s best friend. Which probably said more about Methos’s own contacts than it did about Macleod’s, but still.

So clearly Methos had to take time away from Macleod, even if he didn’t like it. He had to, or else he would drown.

One day last February he packed two suitcases, called up his realtor, and rented a cozy ranch-style in the Hollywood Hills. It came pre-furnished, which was just as well. Taking an old pre-furnished cottage in the English countryside or am outdated apartment in Cairo was always a gamble. One never knew what forgotten antique would be hiding out that would leave a bad taste in Methos’s mouth.

But Los Angeles was a city that bulldozed the old for the new, that captured history on film while letting it fade away in the real world. It was liberating, in its own way. It was the type of respite that Methos needed to refresh and rebuild himself every so often. Looking at the 1950’s wallpaper and mod-style furniture was like hearing a song that hadn’t gotten much airtime in a couple years; comfortably nostalgic but not about to induce a midlife crisis. Plus his house had a pool and, Gods above, Methos loved having a pool.

Methos got up off of the lounge chair when he felt the lighting start to change; night coming on slowly but surely as the sky yawned in shades of gold and purple. He remembered telling that stranded French pilot about sunsets once, as the two of them camped together in a different desert on the other side of the world. Sunsets are wonderful to watch when you’re lonely.

With a final glance at the now violently crimson sky, Methos went inside to fix a pot of coffee and get some more work done. He had started updating the user-interface for the Watcher files he had stolen, and it was coming along splendidly, if he did say so himself. It looked like a real piece of twenty-first century software. Probably technically one of the first of its kind, he mused, as the twenty-first century was only eight months old at this point.

Methos was suddenly ridiculously grateful that at least he got to ring in the millennium with Macleod before this self-exile. They had been invited to a party hosted by the de Valicourts where the Immortal guests had cycled through hundreds of years of New Year’s traditions all while getting tolerably sloshed.

“Did you ever think you would live to see 2000?” Mac had asked while leaning against a wall, more than a little drunk and eyes wide with wonder as a television screen displayed the ball dropping in one corner while several immortals made offerings to Janus in another.

 “I passed two-thousand about three millennia back, remember?” Methos said a little snidely, and Mac gave him a dig with his elbow.

“No, no! You know what I meant,” Mac admonished, but his eyes grew considering. “Do you really get bored of it?” he asked, even though Methos hadn’t said that. His cheeks were glazed red with drink, and it made him look even younger than usual.

“No,” Methos said truthfully, “do you think I would still be around if I did? Every year, ever century, every millennium; they’re all different. It’s the future, Macleod.” Macleod seemed satisfied by this answer, which was good because Methos himself wasn’t exactly sober enough to eloquently elucidate.

“I wonder what this millennia will bring us.”

They leaned companionably next to each for another minute or two, and then the voices of people near the TV picked up.

“5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 – Happy New Year!” they shouted, and Methos joined in. As soon as he got the words out he felt a warm hand at the back of his neck, and then a pair of warm lips pressing lightly against his. It lasted to the count of three, and tasted like honey sweet mead.

“Happy New Year!” Mac said with a drunken smile, and before Methos could even properly respond Mac had turned away to bring tidings of the New Year to more of his friends. Methos’s heart thumped loudly in his chest, and he smiled. Idiot.

At the end of the night Methos and a much more sober Mac had shared a cab together back to Mac’s place, where they silently lit candles and stared at the stars together before going to bed – Mac in his bed and Methos on the couch. Methos had listened and waited for the Highlander’s breath to even out in sleep, but that never came. It only occurred to him now that Macleod might have been waiting for the same thing.

It was a little over a month later that Methos decided he needed to leave, and so far he had lasted a record breaking six months without seeing the Highlander (there had been some internal debate about whether Methos should count the year after Richie’s death in his game before he ultimately decided that it was cheating to count a year where Methos had actively sought out Macleod’s company but was just unable to find him, and while Methos never had anything against cheating the one person he did have to play fair with was himself).

Six months was much better than the embarrassing three months after the whole Galati affair, or the paltry number of weeks he managed after Bordeaux. That had been a disaster.

Methos remembers muttering to himself one night how Macleod could take his sanctimonious attitude and shove it up his ass and hopefully die from the pain and never come back and bother Methos again, and then Amanda showed up not three hours later saying Mac might be in danger and Methos came running.

What a joke.

So it was easy to see why Methos should be proud of his six months. He had worked hard to maintain them. Each month proved something to him – some form of independence, some essence of self he hadn’t lost just because a pretty Scot with good taste in literature batted his eyelashes. Whoever he was before, and whoever he may be in the future, some kernel of truth stayed with him.

But he wasn’t going to make it past six months, he knew that.

Over the past five years, Methos had developed a particular sixth sense for knowing when Duncan Macleod was about to come back into his life. It was a certain taste in the air, a twitch that ran from his toes to his fingers. Also usually a phone call from Joe.

Sometimes Methos tried to head it off, showing up at Mac’s door with an offered “candygram” and blasé look. Lately, however, he’d taken to letting the tide of time push them as it needed.

So he waited, and he sat by the pool and he drank too much coffee and he brushed up on his C++ and he watched a different sunset every day, each more beautiful than the last.

It was maybe three weeks later that Macleod showed up.

It was another hot afternoon, and Methos had decided to go for a swim after lunch. He was resting on a pool raft with his eyes closed and one hand drifting in the water beside him. Methos felt Mac before he saw him, of course.  The buzz of Immortal presence pricked his skull and scraped across his nervous system.

He counted slowly to thirty before opening his eyes, and for a moment Macleod was just a black silhouette against the sun’s rays. Then he stepped forward and his face came into sharp relief.

He looked the same.

“I rang the doorbell a few times, but no one answered,” Mac said, as if that explained his presence here in Southern California. “You know, you really should lock your back-gate.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Methos replied, who knew perfectly well that the gate had been locked. They stared at each other for a few moments, unsure of how to proceed. Mac in a T-Shirt and jeans obviously couldn’t get into the water, and Methos didn’t want to suffer the indignity of flopping off his raft and splashing around just to enjoy some conversation.

Methos eventually pointed to his lounge chair by the side of the pool, and Macleod took a seat.  He looked around the yard for a moment, clearly surveying the unkempt yard with wildflowers growing in patches under eucalyptus trees and weathered garden gnomes left behind by the previous tenant. He had that look that he often got around Methos, like he had a headache from trying to work through a particularly difficult puzzle.

Methos wanted to offer him some aspirin and tell him not to try so hard.

“It’s very charming.”

“Well, it’s not floating in the middle of a river so it’s clearly not your style, but I like it,” Methos said, not really wanting to know if Mac was being sarcastic or not. One could never tell when it came to his sense of décor. Methos had certainly never been so gauche as to hang tapestries behind his bed. At least not since the mid-19th century. “Did Joe tell you where I am?”

“Yup,” Mac said, seemingly without any guilt for ratting out his friend. The bastard could’ve at least called ahead to warn Methos first. He would have gotten out of the pool. “He said that since I was in the neighborhood I might as well pay a visit.”

“What were you in town for, then?” Methos refused to feel hurt that Macleod had come to Los Angeles without intending to see him. He didn’t even know Methos was here, how could he have planned to visit?

And yet Methos did feel a little hurt.

He was allowed to be contrary.

“Hm…” Macleod took a breath before answering, clearly trying to figure out how to explain a large ordeal in a few words, and it was only then that Methos realized how tired he looked. “Have I ever told you about my friend Ceirdwyn?” Mac finally asked.

“I don’t believe so.”

“Well she’s an old friend, and as you know old friends come with histories. Sometimes those histories catch up to them,” Mac shrugged, “so she called for my help and I answered.”

Methos closed his eyes in the glare of the sun and let out a sigh. He could only too easily picture what happened – the distressed call in the middle of the night, the hastily booked airline tickets, running and fighting in a strange city until it all ended with a blast of lightning.

He had seen it happen a dozen times already with Macleod, and each time some deeply superstitious piece of him left over from a history of angry Gods and dark rituals said that Macleod was spurning his days and one day soon he’d run out. It was fucking frustrating, and not a little bit terrifying.

Despite the heat, Methos found himself shivering.

“I think you should know my usual lecture about how sticking your neck out for others often leaves it separated from your head by heart now.”

“A pretty hypocritical lecture at this point,” Macleod muttered, and Methos glared at him.

“They are dead, aren’t they? I don’t have to worry about some half-crazed Immortal showing up at my front door for a challenge?”

“Yeah, he’s not someone we have to worry about anymore.” Mac lifted his eyes in something of an apology but Methos’s glare didn’t crack. “Look on the bright side, if she hadn’t called me out here I never would have gotten to see your charming gnome collection.” That did it. Methos had a hard time suppressing a smile, and stupid as Mac may have been, at least he was here.

“You’ve used charming twice now to describe the place, it’s okay to just say you think it’s ugly.”

“Alright, it’s pretty ugly.”

“Well, I for one am deeply offended. Don’t you know I’ve been collecting garden gnomes for three thousand years now? There were some fine ones back in Carthage. I probably have some made by Hannibal himself” Methos put on a mock scholarly accent, and Macleod barked out a laugh. It felt good to hear him laugh. Methos rolled off of his raft and into the water, floating on his back for a moment before swimming over to the steps nearby. He rose out of the pool dripping wet, and he turned around to see Macleod watching him.

His brows were furrowed and he had dark circles under his eyes. Whatever the trouble with his friend had been, Mac had clearly lost sleep over it.

“You look tired, how did you get here? Can I give you a lift back to your hotel?”

“Um…” Mac blushed and looked away, “actually I was hoping I could stay with you.”

There was, of course, no question that Mac could stay with Methos. He had had his own couch encroached upon enough that to refuse him would be impossible, not that Methos could refuse him much anyways. But it was surprising that he needed somewhere to stay in the first place. Even when he was suddenly dragged across the country to fight unknown enemies, it was rare for Macleod not to arrange some sort of accommodations.

“What, couldn’t pay the hotel bills? Ceirdwyn decided she was tired of your face?” Methos kept his voice light, teasing the Highlander and enjoying the way he blushed even more. Red was a very becoming color on him.

“Ceirdwyn left the city this morning, and I was supposed to, but I called Joe from the airport and he gave me your address and well… here I am.” Mac shrugged helplessly, and Methos felt his mouth drop open.

“You missed your flight just to come see me?” He stared at the other man, wishing that Mac would just make some god damn sense for once. “Why on earth would you do that?”

Logistically speaking it wasn’t unreasonable for Duncan “I’m a secret millionaire” Macleod to change flights as he pleased - if he could afford to keep a struggling dojo afloat as a pet project, he could afford a new set of airline tickets. It was more the principle of the matter.

“Methos, I haven’t seen you in six months! You can stop gaping at me like a damn fish.” Mac said, annoyed but laughing a little bit at Methos who realized his mouth was still hanging open. He closed it so fast that his teeth hurt. “I missed you, and I wanted to know how you were doing. Isn’t that enough?”

Methos shifted and swallowed at the sudden tightness in his throat. He hadn’t even realized how badly he wanted to hear those words until now, but Macleod said it so easily, as if it were so obvious. And maybe it should have been.

“Of course you can stay,” Methos finally said, and Mac lit up at that. Damn that smile, Methos thought ruefully. It was going to be the death of him. “My couch isn’t as comfortable as yours, I’m afraid.”

“I think we both know I’ve slept on worse.”

“You haven’t seen this couch yet. You might end up preferring the pool raft.”

The two of them had lived together so many times by now that it came as no surprise how easily Macleod slipped into Methos’s everyday life. There was no awkward fumbling concerning living space or sleep schedules or chores – there was an understood order to their cohabitation that they were able to pick up at the drop of a hat.

Mac wasn’t shy about using all the hot water, or yelling to just take out the god damn garbage, Methos, it’s full and it smells and they pick up the bins on Thursday. Yes, Thursday is tomorrow, so they need to be _in front of the house_.

Methos didn’t have a house to force Mac to paint but he did have some code for him to write, since he knew the Highlander was a pretty fair hand with computers. Also if Mac was going to complain about the state of the garden the least he could do was fix it up. What? It wasn’t _Methos_ who had a problem with it.

And that’s how their lives proceeded for one week, and then two; coding and gardening and swimming. In the mornings Mac would do katas barefoot in the yard while Methos blearily made coffee and squinted at the sun. Sundays were reserved for the Hollywood Farmer’s Market, where Mac liked to squeeze fruits before he bought them and Methos was carefully instructed by local farmers on proper beekeeping methods even though he had helped domesticate them in the first place. Ancient Egypt was a wild time.

They talked a lot. Not about anything too important, just about whatever the news anchor said on TV, or the time Mac went over Niagara Falls in a barrel, or how they both used to go to the same restaurant in Beijing only a hundred years apart.

“Do you remember those little candies they had in Europe in the… oh I don’t know, the sixteen hundreds?”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Spiced orange peels, sort of.”

“Suckets?”

“Yeah, suckets! I’m craving suckets right now.”

At night they sat out by the pool and watched the sky change colors until it was black with a few scattered stars. Then they would go inside to sleep – Methos in his bed and Mac on the couch.

It was a peaceful time. There were no challenges made, not in the endless city of four million people. It was just the two of them, for the most part, and though they sometimes rode the edges of each other’s nerves until someone broke down and screamed, they were happy.

Yet despite the contentment of the little house in the hills, despite the way Mac’s dark eyes shone underneath the shade of the eucalyptus, Methos knew something was wrong. His heart was getting stretched thin. This couldn’t last. This wasn’t quite real.

It was the very end of September when he made a decision. The smoke of the last wildfire had finally cleared out of the air, and the nights were becoming tinged with the chill of autumn. Methos looked one day to see Mac watching the trees intently, and he realized that they weren’t changing color. They never do in California.

“It’s time to go home,” he said, his computer open on his lap while Mac was crouched in the dirt nearby pulling weeds. Mac stood up and nodded, not asking why now, or where home even was. The sunset that night was a silent affair, and in the morning they left.

Methos watched the sprawling city fall away from the window of the plane. Hills on one side and an ocean on the other, desert to the south and snow to the north. A world in miniature. The perfect place to hide the world’s oldest man. He felt a hand clap him soundly on the shoulder.

“Are you going to miss it?” Macleod asked.

“Yes,” Methos said truthfully. “It won’t be the same when I come back.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“A little of both, I think.”

“But you’ll still come back,” Mac’s voice was cautious, asking a different question than the words implied. You’ll leave again. Not to Los Angeles, but to somewhere.

Methos’s time alone away from Mac had turned into time together spent away from the world, but he couldn’t find it in him to complain. Mac had come just when he was needed, riding in like the proverbial white knight to remind Methos what it was like to talk and laugh and feel – that he didn’t have to be alone if he didn’t want to be. The problem was that sometimes Methos needed to be. For now.

He looked into Mac’s eyes and even though he knew the Highlander understood on some deep intrinsic level why Methos left the way he did, Methos also knew that it never made it any easier. He looked into those dark eyes and wished that he could say his time in Los Angeles had cured him of wanderlust and isolation, that he learned his lesson and there would be no more random disappearances in the future, no more running and hiding.

But Methos knew he couldn’t promise that.

 “I will, one day.” Methos noticed that Mac’s hair had grown out in the past few weeks. It was long enough that it was starting to curl, and it fell into his eyes. Methos brushed it back and smiled. “Not for a while, though.”

Mac returned the smile after a moment. The two settled in for the flight home and for whatever else the new millennium would bring them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> really the horsemen arc gets built up into this huge friendship destroying thing but by all accounts mac and methos are like fairly cool with each other not a month later I mean in "the modern prometheus" they're chill enough together to hang out at bars and such so.
> 
> also i love the idea of immortals having immortal only parties so the new years thing was shameless indulgence and I am sorry.


	3. This old man, he played 2005

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So you haven’t heard, then?” Methos felt his heart speed up. If there had been any bad news Joe would’ve told him already, but what if… “Mac’s got a new student. He’s training him upstate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating change~
> 
> basically I thought through a lot of the fic this week and let's just say many, many things got changed from my initial planning so. here we are. i predicted nothing till chapter 4 but instead it's chapter 3. It may take me a bit longer to write the next chapters since I've had to completely scrap a bunch of stuff.

** 2005 **

Leaves hung heavy on the trees in so many shades of red, orange, and yellow it would make a fire blush. They lined the narrow dirt road leading up to the old farmhouse, which Methos noticed had recently been painted a brilliant shade of robin’s egg blue. Behind the house Methos could just glimpse a dark red barn, the window of the hayloft open and brimming, and acres of woods surround it.

It would make a very pretty postcard. Methos would have liked to receive it in the mail.

He would have liked to receive anything in the mail. But he hadn’t, and that was the problem.

Methos abandoned his car at the top of the dirt path, knowing the sound of the car would draw attention much sooner than his Immortal presence would. He took a moment to appreciate the cool wind ruffling his hair, and the way the air smelled like grass and honey (did the farmhouse boast a beehive as well?) and then put one sure foot in front of the other.

It all started because Macleod was late.

He was supposed to meet Methos at Joe’s bar at 10pm, like he did every week, but Mac was running half an hour late.

“It’s not like him,” Joe muttered after topping off a second glass for Methos, who just shrugged.

“Probably stopped to get a kid’s cat out of a tree.”

“Guy’s got a cell phone, he could give us a ring.”

When Joe had stopped being Mac’s Watcher his anxiety about the Immortal had risen, but it had been bearable. However, since entering what Joe had forbidden Methos from calling his “twilight years” his anxiety had risen about three notches too high, in Methos’s opinion. He supposed it made sense; Joe had spent over twenty years of his life watching Macleod’s every move. He had been more invested than possibly anyone but Macleod himself in whether Mac lived or died. Now any news of Mac’s fate would come second hand. It had to be something like sending a kid off to college, Methos thought.

“You’re an empty-nester, Joe.”

“What?” Joe stared at Methos in confusion for a second before his brows lowered into a glare of understanding. “Be serious. You’re usually the one who’s worried about him.”

“And oh how the tables have turned. It’s refreshing, really.” Methos took a sip of his beer and gave Joe a lazy smile. “What can I say, Joe? Gotta let them stretch their wings and fly.”

“I thought I was the one with an empty nest.”

Admittedly it was a little bit unusual for Methos to be so hands-off about Macleod, that was true, but in the years since Connor Macleod’s death he had felt a change in the younger Immortal. Mac wasn’t necessarily cautious, but considering. Tactful even. There was none of the blind empathy or semi-suicidal heroics Methos had seen before. Macleod wanted to live, and Methos no longer felt that he himself needed to constantly personally ensure it.

But sometimes there was a sadness that clung to Mac’s movements that caused everything to slow down around him. At the beginning it had been a wild, keening hurt, and Methos knew that type of grief very well. It was the sort that made it hard to breathe sometimes in the mornings. Hard to find a slip of reality to grip onto. It had lessened but never disappeared, and now it was more like a single cloud staying firmly in front of the sun on a summer day. Warm except you shivered, bright except you couldn’t see. Greens fading into grays. He and Amanda used to talk about it on the phone, not knowing what to do besides wait.

“We have extended mourning periods to match our extended lives, but at least it’s not like with Keane.” Methos had said, and then winced at the sigh of air Amanda blew into the receiver

“I’m not worried he’s going to lose his head, I’m just worried he’ll never smile again.”

Methos thought he would happy, finally, to stop worrying about Macleod. Happy to wake up and not think ‘I wonder if today is the day that Scottish bastard finally bites it.’ But instead it just felt a little boring, and a little empty. Like the days before he met Duncan Macleod, when Methos sat alone in a room underground and didn’t really care about anything.

He remembered a time on the barge many years ago when he had looked at Macleod and thought “I need to protect that” and lately Methos wasn’t sure whether he had triumphed or failed.

But regardless of the state of Macleod’s mental health, thirty minutes late to a bar meetup was hardly something to be worked up about. Joe needed to keep his shirt on.

Even when Mac hadn’t shown up by the last call, Methos insisted it was all fine. After all, Macleod had proved he could take care of himself in the past. Methos refused to care. Although that refusal ran counter to long-engrained instincts.

“Look, he probably got stuck late at work and called it a night instead of meeting us,” Methos said. Mac had recently taken a Professor position at the Museum of Natural History and he did have a pretty big exhibit on the religious life of the Lakota coming up; it wasn’t inconceivable that he just lost track of time.

“Mm,” Joe murmured, coming around to the idea, “or Amanda showed up and they’re just too wrapped up in each other to call.” Joe was pacified by the thought, so Methos didn’t tell him that Amanda had sent him a picture this morning of the view from her hotel room, which was a gorgeous portrait of the mountains of Argentina. He didn’t tell him that Amanda wasn’t built to carry Mac’s sadness.

“Sure. Maybe it’s Amanda. He’s fine, and tomorrow or the day after he’ll stop by so wracked with Scottish Guilt that he’ll pay off my bar tab.”

“Hah. Mac’s never felt that guilty, bud.” So Joe closed the bar and Methos went home a little annoyed at Mac for making him deal with Joe’s worries, but more or less assured of the Highlander’s safety, if not his happiness.

Only Methos didn’t hear any word from him over the course of the next week. He had hoped for an apology, would have settled for a verbal brush-off, but was unnerved by the silence. At first he tried to put it out of his mind. If Macleod wanted to run and hide that was fine. It wasn’t like Methos hadn’t done it himself. But as the week flew by Methos couldn’t stop the nervous twitch in his fingers. It wasn’t like the Highlander to be so… impolite. Especially not lately.

“So is Macleod actually going to make an appearance this week?” Methos asked as casually as he possibly could, aware of Joe’s uncanny abilities when it came to reading his true mood. Joe raised an eyebrow.

“Oh how the tables have turned,” Joe mimicked.

“What, weren’t you the one worried about him last week?” Methos asked, aware he sounded defensive.

“Yeah, until I managed to reach him on his cell a couple days later. You didn’t try giving him a call?” Joe asked in astonishment, and Methos didn’t know how to explain that he was waiting for Mac to call _him_. Methos didn’t call – he showed up unannounced and took his shoes off before he even said hello.

“Maybe I lost his number,” he finally said.

“So you haven’t heard, then?” Methos felt his heart speed up. If there had been any bad news Joe would’ve told him already, but what if… “Mac’s got a new student. He’s training him upstate.”

Oh. 

“I didn’t expect…” Methos stopped himself. Sometime right after it happened, when things were still very bad and Mac had been very drunk, he had told Methos that between Connor and Richie maybe this wasn’t a lineage that was meant to continue. No more teachers, no more students. It was a cycle that would stop with Macleod. For once, Methos had believed his melodramatics as more than just that.

“I don’t think he did either,” Joe said gruffly. “Kid happened to be killed in front of him, and then they had a head hunter on their tail. When she saw someone as strong as Macleod protecting such a young Immortal she turned tail and ran.”

Anyone who spent their time trying to pick off new Immortals would be no match for Macleod, Methos knew, but there was always that lingering sense of danger in any fight. All you had to do was move wrong once, or get little unlucky with you surroundings, and even the most experienced fighter would be toast.

 “What made Mac go north?”

“You can ask him yourself,” Joe said pointedly. Methos smiled thinly.

“I don’t really think this the type of thing you discuss over the phone. Oh hey, Mac, heard you rescued a fledgling Immortal which means that now you’re probably brooding about it and weeping daily – how’s that going?”

“I have an address,” Joe pushed a piece of paper across the bar towards Methos, “you can have that conversation in person.”

“You just have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Methos took the piece of paper and looked at Joe’s chicken scratch handwriting. It was an address in upstate New York, somewhere pretty rural if Methos remembered his local geography well. Which he may not. Sometimes he was still confused by the large buildings that suffocated him on all sides – it was almost impossible to put it together with the wooded hillsides Methos had made camp on when he first came to the continent a millennia ago.

He took a sip of his beer. And then another one.

“So?” Joe prompted.

“So, what?” Methos asked back. He stuffed the address into his pocket and drained his beer, making a face as the bitter bottom hit his tongue. “Night, Joe.”

“I’m going to tell him you’re coming up to visit.”

“You can do that, it won’t make it true.”

Methos held onto the address for two weeks before deciding to do something about it. He left it on his bedside table and would sigh a little at it before he went to sleep, as if that would make it disappear. Then one morning for no particular reason at all he got up, packed a duffle, and drove off into the northern wilderness until he got to where he was now, walking up to the most beautiful, idyllic house in the Eastern United States. Just to say hi. Not because he was worried or anything.

He walked as close as he could before he felt Immortal presence overcome him, his spine stiffening slightly even with the foreknowledge, and then he waited quietly in front of the bright blue house. The door opened with a groan, and there was Macleod standing right in front of him. His hair was the shortest Methos had ever seen it, just a layer of brown fuzz really, and he was unfairly handsome in a red flannel shirt and jeans. His eyes glinted gold in the sunlight when he caught sight of Methos. He looked good. Healthy in a way Methos hadn’t seen in a long time.

“You don’t call, you don’t write. I would have at least liked a postcard.” Methos shook his head. “A fellow would almost think he’s not wanted.”

“Methos. I’m glad you came.”

They stared at each other for a moment, just drinking in the sight of each other. Mac’s lips were quirked up in the barest hint of a smile, and he was giving Methos that look that had become so familiar in the past few years. Like he was falling down a deep hole and Methos was the only one around to catch him. Before he knew what he was doing, Methos took five large steps forward and wrapped Macleod in a tight hug and Macleod returned it, gripping Methos’s coat and rocking back and forth slightly.

Mac smelled like hay and sweat and dirt, and Methos breathed it in deeply before he pulled back.

“So come on, let’s see this new student of yours.”

Mac led Methos into the farmhouse, and he took a moment to appreciate it for the antique it tried to be. Handmade quilts hung over tired couches, and old photographs of generations of farmers with the same hard-times grimace on their face covered the walls. The wooden cross in the corner was an especially nice touch. But Methos remembered a time before crosses.

“It’s charming,” Methos murmured, and Mac rolled his eyes at the remembered dig from years before. There was something about him that was more relaxed, like a rubber band in him had been snapped and repaired. Methos saw a bit more of the sun in the flash of his teeth.

“He should be around here somewhere… Gabe?” Mac called. Methos heard the patter of feet on old wood echo through the building until he was faced with a hesitant young man. His presence before Methos suddenly made him very real, and therefore very strange.

“Gabe, I’d like you to meet my old friend, Ad- um, Ellis Marks,” Methos had given up the Pierson identity around the time he moved to New York in favor of being Ellis Marks – a computer systems analyst who made much more money. But Mac still sometimes stumbled over the name change. “Ellis, I’d like to introduce you to my student, Gabe Parker.”

“Hi,” Gabe said a little shyly, extending his hand for a shake, and Methos gave it a firm grasp.

“Pleasure.”

He observed Gabe closely all throughout lunch, and he tried to place him against Richie. Both were about the same age, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, but Gabe was black where Richie was white, tall and lanky where Richie had been sturdy and compact, and he moved simply through life with an easy grace while Richie had attacked life with energy and power. Gabe had a soft way of speaking that the streets had beaten out of Richie, and once the dishes were washed he respectfully disappeared, whereas Methos knew Richie would be butting up into the conversation.

“He’s not Richie,” Methos said. They were settled on the couch in the living room together, each with a beer in hand. This couch was even worse than the one Methos had in LA.

“Hopefully not,” Mac said darkly.

“So who is he?”

“One of the pre-immortals I found young,” so not completely different from Richie then, Methos thought. “Kid’s got a real talent for dance. I paid for him to go to ballet school, and I was watching a rehearsal for his first solo professional performance when he was killed.”

“Accidents happen?” Methos asked carefully, and was relieved when Mac nodded slowly. Good, he hadn’t come here to get involved in some twisted conspiracy theory.

“I think so. Some sheetrock from the unfinished background fell on him and…” Mac shrugged, what can you do? “He stayed a day or so at my place and then he was unlucky enough to run into that head hunter. I thought it was best if we skipped town.”

“We’re on holy ground, aren’t we?” Holy ground had a particular taste to it by now for Methos. Something a little coppery, a little stale. Properly foreboding.

“All the way out to the barn,” Mac nodded, “they used to hold revivalist meetings up here. Whitefield or someone must have consecrated the grounds.”

“I never liked him, was glad when he inflicted himself on the colonies,” Methos said, earning another small smile from the Highlander. His smiles had become hard won trophies lately. They sat in silence for a few moments before Mac placed a hand lightly on Methos’s wrist.

“I really am sorry that I forgot to tell you,” Mac said, “I wasn’t exactly expecting this to happen, and I just didn’t think....” Mac trailed off, and Methos wondered if he battled it the same way Methos did. If his escape to the farm was his way of trying to deny the undeniable pull between them. If he had sat staring at the phone the same way, daring himself to make the call. Break the silence. “I didn’t think we owed that to each other,” Mac finished.

Which they didn’t. Not really. It was a rule Methos had set.

“It’s fine, Mac.”

“To be fair, I knew Joe would tell you.”

 “It’s not nice of us to keep making Joe play passenger pigeon,” Methos said, skirting around the bigger issue.

“No,” Mac agreed, and maybe that was a conversation they should have. Eventually. In the future. But Methos didn’t think he could handle it now, after hours of driving to one of the most beautiful places he had ever seen, after sitting so close to Macleod on this tiny old couch that he could feel the heat bleeding through his clothe. After a week of shunted worry and regret knotting in his chest, years of watching shadows trail in Mac’s footsteps, and then suddenly these smiles.

“So, give me the grand tour.”

They went outside where Gabe was finishing up chopping wood and stood overlooking the small green pasture that stood between the house and the barn, listening to the cries of the sheep and the buzz of honeybees. To the left of the hives was a small fenced off garden, with rows of pea pods, onions, and potatoes, as well as a separate section devoted entirely to herbs. Methos was glad Mac’s green thumb was being put to use – his windowsill garden in the city had been a little dispiriting to look at.

“It really is charming,” Methos admitted, and he had the thought that Mac belonged here. But then, Mac tended to belong to wherever he was.

“It’ll do. Gabe, you want to show Ellis what you’ve been learning?”

Methos watched Mac spar with Gabe and felt a small frown creep across his face. Gabe was clearly still new to the sword, and only beginning to get over his awkwardness in holding it, but his dancer’s body was built for the activity. What he lacked wasn’t the movement or finesse; it was the aggression, the tenacity. And that can’t be taught, Methos thought darkly, that can only be learned. Macleod locked eyes with Methos; he had noticed the same thing.

After an hour they called it quits, and Gabe’s bruises started to heal before he even put his sword away.

“You can’t control how other people feel,” Methos warned.

“I know,” Mac sighed, “it’s just different for me. I learned from a young age that fighting was the only way to guarantee to justice. To guarantee survival. I know now that that isn’t always true, but it can be hard to understand why someone would not... how he could not…” he made a strangled noise and broke off, looking away from Methos who kept his eyes steadily forward. This was a bridge between them they had never quite been able to cross. “Anyways, he’ll get there.”

They cooked dinner together, because no matter how many times Mac moved he always arranged his kitchen the same way and by now they had mastered the art of cooperative living. Methos could feel Gabe watching them closely, trying exactly to work out what they were. Mac was his teacher, Methos was an interloper, and together they were… Friends? Lovers? Brothers? Methos would let him know when he figured it out himself.

There were too many rooms in the house, which meant no one had to take the god awful couch. Methos chose one down the hall from Mac’s and winced at the sound of his feet creaking across the old wood. The room was simple and barely furnished, but the blanket was soft if scratchy and the bed was warm and smelled nice. He felt safe out here in the middle of nowhere, with the heavy taste of maple and oak and sacrament around him.

“You’ll come back soon?” Macleod asked the next morning, dark eyes eagerly looking into Methos’s own. Eagerness wasn’t something Methos had seen from him in a long time. Just tired acceptance. Methos looked down into his coffee.

“You’ll know me when you see me.”

The weeks continued like that, with Methos driving up on the weekends – sometimes with Joe but more often without – and helping out for a day at the farm where the air was so fresh Methos could sometimes feel it burning the back of his throat. He spent a lot of time there watching Macleod. Cataloging his smiles and measuring the rise of his chest when he breathed, the slope of his shoulders in the morning. Trying to figure out exactly what had changed between this Saturday and the last. Macleod was suddenly like an old windup doll someone had finally found the key to.

Gabe’s training remained a problem, however. He mastered the movements without the feeling, the steps without the tempo. Every time he got knocked down he only took a breath, and calmed himself down. Accepting punishment but refusing to give it out.

“Again,” Macleod would order, and Gabe would rise slowly. Every time he stood back up Methos saw something spark and jump in Macleod’s eyes, which would be heartening if Gabe’s didn’t seem so politely empty. After every practice session Gabe would spend hours walking around the woods, while Macleod simmered and fretted in the house.

“You’re good for him,” Methos tried saying on one of the times he tagged along on Gabe’s walk. “He’s been through some stuff lately.” He saw Gabe slowly clench and unclench his hands, carefully flexing his fingers before answering.

“I get the feeling that you both have,” Gabe gave Methos a steady look, daring him to disagree, but Methos just nodded.

“Comes with the territory, you know.”

“I think I do," Gabe said unhappily, and Methos grew worried.

The leaves fell off the trees, and Methos took a week off of work to stay at the farm when the grass was blanketed in a thick layer of white. The snow gave a muffled feeling to the air around the farmhouse, and sometimes Methos could swear that he heard his own blood running through his veins. His nose was almost constantly red with the cold, and no, Mac, he didn’t appreciate being called Rudolph.

“You know, you could turn this place into a pretty popular inn,” he remarked to Macleod one day as the two of them walked back from the barn, his breath visible in the frigid air. “You have enough rooms for it, and stupid young people are always itching to spend time in frozen wastelands like this. You could have sleigh rides or something. ”

“If it’s such a wasteland why do you spend so much time here?” Mac asked, bumping his shoulder into Methos’s.

“Good company,” Methos replied, and when Mac broke out into one of his huge smiles that made Methos run just a little too hot he added, “By which of course I mean the sheep.”

“I’ll just take that as a compliment to my sheep. They are very thick and bonnie; enough to woo any fair lass.” Mac ratcheted up his Scottish accent and Methos giggled and bumped his shoulder back into Macleod’s, and he bumped his shoulder back, and suddenly they were laughing and wrestling in the snow. Methos shoved snow down the back of Mac’s pants and he howled.

“Oh, I am going to get you!” They chased each other until their laughter made it hard to breathe, and they had to sit down. Methos looked at Mac and saw his eyes bright and alive, and his skin raw and pink with the cold. His wool cap had fallen off and his short hair was covered in a fine dusting of white and it looked very soft. Methos wanted badly to touch it.

And he was so in love with Macleod then. So pathetically glad in that moment for whatever this farm was doing. So happy to have his secret smiles and his bad jokes and off-key singing. Methos had allowed himself to be enfolded into the gray of Mac’s life after Connor, and after a while he had stopped noticing the loss of color. Having it back now felt a little bit like looking into the sun, but it was a pain Methos was willing to bear. Mac stilled when he saw the relief that had taken hold of every muscle in Methos’s body. His smile grew smaller and a little sad. He reached out and ran a glove hand over Methos’s cheek before pulling him in close.

“I’m back now. I’m back. Thank you for waiting.”

They didn’t say anything else.

There were a few times after that where they almost… well, Methos isn’t quite sure what they almost did. They would be very close and their eyes would meet and one of them would move and Methos could feel his heartbeat speed up but then something would throw them off. A shift in the air, a change of the light. It would end in abortive movements and awkward smiles.

Spring bled into the world like a bullet wound, and still Mac didn’t let Gabe didn’t leave the little farm for anything other than a trip down to the market.

“I want him to be ready,” Mac insisted.

“He may never be,” Methos shrugged. “Do you know I actually invented the phrase 'you can lead a horse to water'?”

“You did not, you great liar.”

“You’re right, but the point still stands.” You can’t force a student to learn and you can’t force a person to change. Methos had learned the lesson a dozen times over in his life – with Byron, Kronos, and the other nameless dead of his past. After all, that’s why they were dead and Methos was alive. Or, well, that was one of the reasons, at least.

But Macleod, as usual, refused to take no for an answer. The training increased and the tension between student and teacher bloomed along with the azaleas. Mac was growing frustrated and Gabe was becoming sulky and withdrawn. Methos could see it all building, ready to go off like the proverbial powder keg.

And then one day it did.

They had been sparring outside, the snow mostly melted enough that they didn’t sink down into it anymore. Mac drove Gabe backwards, dodged his parry-repost, and then slammed the flat of his palm into his chest and watched as Gabe fell hard on his ass. It was the fourth time Gabe had been knocked down that day, and as always he stood back up. But this time was different. He dropped his sword on the ground.

“I’m done,” he said.

“No you’re not,” Mac replied, but Gabe just shook his head.

“I’m done. I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Well I’m sorry, Gabe, but this is your life now.” Mac’s voice was rising, and his hands were clenched so tight his knuckles were white. Methos knew they had had this conversation half a dozen times by now. He gave a little push at Gabe’s shoulders. “Come on.” Gabe remained silent. “Come on, Gabe. Fight.”

“I don’t want to,” Gabe said a little bit louder. “I don’t want to fight! I don’t want this to be my life! Stop trying to drag me into this world!” He was yelling now.

“You’re already in it,” Mac said, completely exasperated by now. “I’m just trying to make sure you survive.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t, there can be only one, right? Maybe I wasn’t meant to survive.” Methos saw Gabe’s words cut Mac to the quick, and saw his anger roar out of the opening.

“Well, dammit, I can’t just let you die! Not again!”

Then the entire world went quiet, and Mac seemed to stop breathing. Methos felt his eyes widen involuntarily at the words. So that’s what this had been about. What gave Mac purpose once more. Dragging someone back from the dead. Trust Duncan Macleod to play the part of Orpheus, Methos supposed. Whether he was trying to sing back Connor or Richie, Methos didn’t know, but it didn’t really matter. You weren’t supposed to look back and see.

Gabe stood gaping at his teacher for a moment, and then turned on his heel and ran into the woods. Macleod turned his back and ran his hand through his hair, and then looked surprised at its short length. Methos walked up to him carefully, and laid a hand on the back of his neck.

“He’s not Richie. He’s not Connor. He’s not anybody but himself.”

“I forget that sometimes,” Macleod admitted quietly, which Methos thought was particularly brave, “but… I can’t let him die, Methos. I can’t let another one die.” Mac shivered under his hand, and Methos sighed. If Gabe wanted to die, then nothing they said would change that.

“I’ll go talk to him.”

Methos walked out past the barn, and it wasn’t long before the trees overtook him and for a moment Methos could have been in any forest anywhere in the world in the last five thousand years. He nearly stumbled with the vertigo of too many memories hitting him too fast.

“Gabe?” he called out, unsure if anyone would answer him except for the trees, but after a moment he heard a small voice call back.

“I’m over here, Ellis.”

Gabe was leaning against a tree, looking completely exhausted.

“If you want to die, you can,” Methos said, and Gabe’s eyes popped open.

“You’ll kill me?”

“No, no. Mac would never forgive me for that. But it won’t be hard to find someone who would. Like you said, there can be only one.” He leaned against the tree next to Gabe, and felt more than heard the long sigh that escaped the young Immortal’s body.

“I won’t be able to dance anymore,” Gabe said, “not professionally, anyways.” Gabe hadn’t brought up the topic of his dancing in all the time Methos had known him, but sometimes Methos would catch him moving through long rehearsed steps outside where Mac couldn’t see. Methos thought it had just been for practice, or exercise, but now he could see the deep longing in Gabe’s eyes.

“No, probably not for several decades at least,” Methos replied gently, and placed a hand on Gabe’s back when he let out a sob. He was so young. They were always so young.

“I want my old life back. I keep trying to forget it, but I want it back.” Gabe wiped his nose with the back of his hand and then looked up to stare at Methos. His eyes were red with tears, and he reminded Methos of an open wound. “How do you do it?” he asked. “How can you lose so much?” This was not the first time Methos had answered this question, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last, but he considered his words carefully, like always.

“You’re very young,” he said. “I don’t think you understand how young you are. It’s hard to see now, but the world will only grow wider the longer you live. You will gain more than you will lose, and while that doesn’t make up for the things that are gone, I promise you that it is worth it to live, and learn, and fight another day.” He watched Gabe turn the words over in his head. Probably no more than Mac had ever said to him, but with considerable new weight coming from a man who seemed ready to let him walk out into the world and die.

Which Methos had never truthfully considered letting happen, but Gabe didn’t know that.

“What if it’s not worth it, for me?” Gabe asked. “What if this is where it all stops?”

“Nothing ever stops.” They leaned against the tree quietly, and Methos tried to remember what it was like near the beginning. To have the gaping hole of eternity spread out before him. Immortality could make one feel so small. “Have you actually told Mac why you’re afraid to fight?” He asked. Because it was fear that was driving Gabe’s actions, he could see that now.

“Mac, he- he’s already done so much for me, I didn’t want to complain. I couldn’t just say ‘oh I don’t want this,’ you know?” Gabe huffed a bitter laugh. “Until, I guess, I did say that.”

“Yes, he does seem to have that effect upon people,” Methos said drily, “but he’s also been through this himself, and with others. You’d be surprised how much he understands.” Though he never understands quite enough, Methos mentally added. Gabe sniffed and gave him a shy smile.

“He says you’re old friends. You must’ve known him for, like, hundreds of years, right?”

“Barely ten, actually,” Methos laughed, “and that’s small change in the life of an immortal. Old friends? More like good acquaintances.” He punctuated the sentence with a wink, and Gabe smiled like he got the joke. Which maybe he did.

“How old are you anyways?” Gabe asked, giving Methos a look out of the corner of his eye. Methos could tell he had never quite believed the lie of six hundred, and in that moment Methos almost told him that he was the oldest living being to walk the planet. That he had seen so many civilizations rise and fall that they held no meaning for him anymore. But instead he just quirked his mouth a bit.

“Very. So when I tell you it’s all worth it, you should believe me. Or you can try to outlive me and tell me I’m full of shit. Go on and try, I dare you. You don’t have to want to fight, but you should want to live.”

 “I... do,” Gabe finally said.

Methos knew his words hadn’t necessarily changed his mind, but maybe now Gabe would live long enough to see the truth of them. Hopefully. Then Methos heard Mac clear his throat behind them. He whirled around to see the Highlander looking slightly embarrassed, and carrying a large flashlight. Mac wouldn’t quite meet his eyes for some reason.

“It’s getting dark, I didn’t want you two to have trouble finding your way home.” Mac walked up to them and laid a hand down on Gabe’s shoulder. He didn’t say anything, and Gabe didn’t either. But it was enough for now.

They walked back to the house together, and Methos thought some tension would linger between Mac and Gabe for a while, but he hadn’t been prepared for the weird looks Mac started throwing him. Half-startled, worried little things that made Mac’s brow furrow and his mouther pucker. God, Methos thought, it was like if there wasn’t a problem with someone then Mac had to invent one. What could he possibly have done wrong now? If Mac had uncovered yet another part of Methos’s pas that he would rather forget, then it was nobody’s fault but his own. Methos had warned him years ago to stop digging.

All through dinner Methos retraced his steps of the day and tried to figure out what bee had gotten into Mac’s bonnet, before he finally decided to give up and go to bed. If something was wrong, Mac would eventually drag it to the surface and tell him. He always did. So he burrowed under the covers, and forced himself into a deep, dark sleep.

He woke up to the creaking of the floorboards, assumed it was someone going to the bathroom, and had almost fallen back asleep when his bedroom door opened.

“Methos?” Mac’s voice floated out in the dark, and it took Methos a second to get his own voice working.

“Mac? Are you okay?” His mouth felt fuzzy and he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or not. He had a lot of dreams that started like this.

“Yeah. No. Um.” Methos heard Mac make his way in the dark before he sat down on the bed right by Methos’s feet. His eyes were beginning to adjust to the dark, and he could just make out the gentle slope of Mac’s nose. “I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said the other day.”

“I say a lot of things, remind me,” Methos replied, trying to get past the haze of sleep and remember what he actually had said, before remembering that he didn’t think he had said anything in the first place.

“About us being acquaintances.” Methos hadn’t been aware that Mac had heard that. “We _are_ friends. Or, well, I think we are. You’re one of my best friends. I thought you knew that by now.”

“ _That’s_ what’s been keeping you up at night?” Not their usual argument about life and death, but just the idea that maybe Methos didn’t think they were friends? He immediately started laughing. He felt tears coming from his eyes, and his sides were seizing up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake Mac, I was making a joke! Do you think I’d come help you babysit in the middle of nowhere otherwise?”

“You’ll wake Gabe,” Mac warned, and Methos could hear in his voice that he didn’t think it was any joke, and Methos suddenly saw it from Mac’s point of view. Ten years was one thing compared with Mac’s four hundred, but with Methos’s five millennia? For all Mac knew, Methos really did see him as no more than a stranger – their time together just a blink of his eye.

The idea that Methos could ever be anything but hopelessly in love with Macleod from the moment they met was so preposterous to Methos that he almost started laughing again.

“Mac. Duncan.” Methos wasn’t sure what to say. He wanted to tell him that they were friends, of course they were friends, and they were friends in a way that Methos clung to so tightly his circulation sometimes stopped, but that didn’t seem enough. Connor Macleod had been a friend, and in a sense he had still betrayed Duncan in the worst way. Besides, friends didn't tell the whole truth.

Instead he reached forward and grabbed Mac’s hand, his vision having improved enough to see the outline of his body, and the set of his mouth that let Methos know Mac thought he was still being laughed at. He gave Mac’s hand a good squeeze. “Don’t you remember what I said all those years ago?”

“You say a lot of things, remind me.”

“You’re too important to lose.”

He felt something completely unravel in Macleod then. The last bit of guilt, the last bit of anger and despair he had held since Connor’s death. It uncoiled itself from his heart, and slipped out softly inside his sigh. Mac gave a reassuring squeeze back, and Methos thought he would leave the room, his worries assuaged. Instead he shifted, and settled back into the bed next to Methos, their hands still tightly gripped together.

“You are too, you know.”

Which was something Methos knew instinctively, but which he hadn’t heard from another person in a long, long time. He felt his breath catch in his throat, and all the words he could’ve said escaped him. So he did the only thing he could think to do, which was turn slightly and kiss Mac on the mouth.

His lips were as warm as they had been on that New Year’s Eve years ago, only this time the kiss lasted for much longer than the count of three. Methos felt Mac’s free hand move from his chest to his cheek to finally cradle the back of his head, holding him closer and kissing back hard. They broke for air, and Mac mad his way across Methos jaw and down to his neck, adding pressure and teeth at just the right places to make Methos gasp.

Mac rolled them over slightly until he was leaning above Methos and straddling his hips, but instead of turning his attention to the growing hardness between them Methos reached his hands up and ran them through Mac’s buzzed hair, giving in to a temptation he’d felt since he first showed up on Mac’s doorstep last fall.

“Why did you cut it?” he asked, moving his fingers in circles through the soft, short length of hair that shone black in the moonlight.

“I was making a promise,” Mac said, his eyes closing a little bit as he lost a little bit of self-control and pushed his hips against Methos’s, “I can grow it back, if you’d like?” he offered hesitantly, mistaking Methos’s reason for asking the question.

“I like you any way you are,” Methos answered simply, and he only got a moment to look up at Duncan’s face, to meet his eyes in the darkness and brace himself before Duncan captured him in another bruising kiss. Amanda had long bragged of Duncan’s kissing abilities, and now Methos could understand why. He was lost in the sensation of Duncan’s lips, tongue, and teeth. His mind went blank and his hands scrabbled through Mac’s hair before sliding down his back and then lifting up Mac’s shirt haphazardly to scrape at smooth skin.

Mac pulled away enough to throw his shirt onto the ground, and then Methos’s. He resumed his earlier interest in Methos’s neck, sucking what would definitely be some very noticeable bruises into his skin if not for Immortal healing, and then traveled down to his collar bone, and then his chest. Methos squirmed as Mac’s mouth hit the sensitive parts of his stomach, and yelped out a giggle when his tongue found a particularly ticklish spot.

“If you use that against me in the future, I swear…” Methos started, but stilled when he felt Duncan’s warm breath against his boxers. He looked down in alarm at Mac, who was hovering right above where Methos’s cock strained against the cotton fabric.

Mac looked back up at Methos through his lashes and bent his head slightly to nuzzle against the hard length. “Oh, Gods, Mac, just…” Methos hissed a little as Duncan pulled his boxers down. Cold air greeted very hot skin and caused him to twitch involuntarily, which turned into a full body shudder when Mac licked up his length slowly.

“Can I?” Duncan asked, his voice coming out low and husky in a seductive tone Methos didn’t think he had ever heard before in his life, and he had been seduced by Lord Byron. Mac’s hands were rubbing against Methos’s thighs, but they rose to clutch steadily at his waist upon Methos’s jerky nod. Methos couldn’t hold back a moan when he felt Duncan take him into his mouth, and the noise seemed to give Mac all encouragement he needed to go wild. Methos's hips bucked up of their own accord but Mac held them down firmly, his calloused hands strong but gentle, careful not to push or bruise.

Methos’s tried to keep his hands away from Mac’s head, something about the motion either too intimate or too crass, but he lost himself somewhere in the haze of pleasure and relief of love returned, and before he knew it he was threading his fingers through Duncan’s short hair again, whispering a prayer in a tongue so old Methos couldn’t remember where it was from, or what god it was meant for.

He closed his eyes when he came, spots of color dancing across his eyelids. He felt Duncan petting his sides, calming his heaving chest, and then he felt him kiss one eyelid and then the other. He looked to see Duncan’s face hovering over his again, his smile shining in the small bit of light the room offered. Methos reached a hand up and caressed his cheek, saying the prayer again when his voice came back to him.

“What does that mean?” Duncan asked softly, sitting back when Methos pushed against his chest slightly.

“Let the sun shine on him, for he is dear to me.”

Methos kissed Duncan again, kissed him with all the sadness he’d felt watching Duncan since Connor’s death, all the sweetness of their years together. Methos kept kissing him as he put a hand down between them, grabbing Mac’s cock and stroking softly. He felt Duncan’s shoulders tighten, felt him pull away a little to catch his breath, their lips just barely touching. Duncan turned his face a little into Methos’s and let out a small noise before coming in Methos’s hand.

They sat on the bed for a few moments, breathing deeply and not saying anything, and then Methos looked down at his messy and frankly gross hand and said “you’d better go get me a wash cloth.”

“Go get it yourself.”

“The floor is too cold.”

“You big baby,” Duncan rolled his eyes as he stood up, but even in the dark Methos could tell that his look was fond, and he came back dutifuly with a warm wet rag to clean them both off. Satisfied that they weren’t going to stick together in the middle of the night, Methos settled down into the scratchy blankets with Duncan at his side, one arm draped loosely around him and his nose presseing against the back of his neck.

“I think next weekend you two should come visit me in the city,” Methos said, already unable to keep his eyes open. “Let Gabe get off this fucking farm.” Duncan reached up and smoothed a hand across Methos’s now sweaty hair, thinking for a moment.

“Okay. Next weekend.”

The last thing Methos remembered before falling back asleep was Macleod carding his hand softly through his hair, and his lips pressing lightly into his neck.

Things got better after that.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgot to say this before but the name Ellis Marks come from me wikipedia-ing Babylonian creation myths, because I think it would be weird for five thousand year old Methos to keep using Adam puns all the time, when like as not his first exposures to religion were not Judeo-Christian. 
> 
> I want to say that I don't actually have any friends who like Highlander so I have no one to beta, so if you notice a mistake be so kind as to point it out to me and I'll edit the chapter to fix it
> 
> also i haven't watched endgame frankly since i was like ten years old, i have no real desire at all to watch it again, so chronologically something may be off here but that's fine I think we can all just agree to ignore me making a mistake about what year endgame took place in


	4. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 2010, I love you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The word “drugged” lingered for a second, but it swam away from him as quickly as it came. Then suddenly he grew cold, and everything was dark, and everything stopped

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took a bit longer, I'm no longer an unemployed college grad but am now a working adult so... little bit less time to spend doing things. Still, we're in the home stretch now! I will finish!

** 2010 **

Methos’s mouth was dry. His mouth was dry and he tried to lick his lips but he couldn’t. Couldn’t quite get his lips open, couldn’t feel his face.  His thoughts tumbled around his mind like leaves in a twister, flashing across his eyes one moment and gone the next. A sword, a pair of dark brown eyes, the smell of rotting fish. The word “drugged” lingered for a second, but it swam away from him as quickly as it came. Then suddenly he grew cold, and everything was dark, and everything stopped.

There was nothing.

For what felt like an eternity.

(and Methos was an expert on eternities)

Then he woke up.

Methos moved his lips experimentally and fluttered his eyelids, pleased to find both working even if his mouth was still so dry. He panicked for a moment when his arms didn’t respond, but then he realized that they were just handcuffed tightly behind his back in a pair of old-fashioned iron manacles. Which didn’t necessarily help his situation, but at least he knew what he was dealing with. Any knowledge is good knowledge, he always said.

As more feeling trickled back to him Methos realized that he was in pain, which was unusual. Whatever beating he took must have happened recently, so most likely while he was unconscious. Not the most sympathetic of jailers then. He opened his eyes slowly to see zinging stripes of blue lightning flashing across his body, fixing a cut on his thigh and what must’ve been a cracked rib. He was in a cell of some sort, the cement cold against his back, and either it was night or there were no windows, because the only light in the room came from a single hanging bulb above him.

“Glad to see you’re awake,” a voice said, only it didn’t sound glad, and a woman with bright orange hair stepped out of the darkness to stand in front of Methos’s cell.

“Glad to be awake,” Methos said, except it came out more like “glah tah be wake” because his mouth wasn’t quite up to finer movements just yet.

“Do you know who I am?” the woman asked. Methos peered at her in the dim light of the cell, sifting back through five thousand years of memories to place her, but his brain still felt slow and stilted, and the memories were coming to him only half formed. She could have been anyone.

“No…” Methos said cautiously, unsure what answer she was expecting. He was not currently in a position where he could afford to be wrong about many things. Fortunately, she just gave him a blank stare.

“Think a little harder, it’ll come to you.”

Methos stared at her face, at the lines on her forehead and her crooked nose and the rings of copper curls cascading down her back. She was an Immortal, he could feel that much now. Old. Very old. But her face… something tickled at the back of Methos’s mind. He didn’t know her, but that was the problem.

He and Duncan, they had been walking… where were they walking? In Seacouver, right. Methos had been there on one of his… extended visits. They were walking and they felt her, saw her, and she stared right at Methos. Caught his eye and wouldn’t drop her gaze. Then she disappeared into the crowd.

“Someone you know?” Mac had asked, and Methos said no. He didn’t know her. Truthfully, he couldn’t remember ever seeing her before. “Well…” Mac had said carefully, and Methos remembered the look he gave him. Like an animal that might bolt or a dam that might break. “I wouldn’t worry too much,” he said, which was a little bit like asking the sun not to shine. “If she wants something, she’ll let you know.”

“They always do,” Methos had muttered, and to his credit he had stayed.

He had stayed with Macleod for three more days, trying to trick himself into the safety he only really felt in Duncan’s arms. This one won’t kill me. This one will save me. But then one day when Duncan was out for groceries Methos felt a presence staying almost out of reach, but not quite. He knew it couldn’t be Macleod, he knew it had to be her, watching, waiting. So he ran.

He never forgot the burning in Mac’s eyes when Cassandra told him about Methos, or the way his skull had rattled Mac had slammed him in to the car after confessing his sins. Things had been going so well these last few years, and Methos wouldn’t… he couldn’t face that again.

Not when he didn’t know how it would end.

So he ran, wanting to give himself time to research and regroup. Only he didn’t remember getting captured, so he must’ve not run fast enough.

Would Duncan come to save him? Probably not. He would read Methos’s absence exactly as what it originally was – one of the many times Methos needed to be far away. He wouldn’t begin to get worried for another month or two, Amanda never worried, and as for Dawson, he had learned the benefits of plausible deniability years ago. Methos was alone. Truly now.

“You killed my mother,” the woman said, Methos’s silence having taken too long. “You killed her, and my father, and my whole village. I was just a girl, and my brother took my hand and we ran… but I remember turning back, and seeing your face against the flames.” A single tear rolled down her cheek, but her voice was strong enough to cut steel.

Methos could picture it. His hair stuck up with animal fat, his face blue and demonic, his heart hollow and cold. He didn’t remember the girl but that didn’t matter when he knew there were hundreds just like her, and he bit his lip to keep from shuddering.

She unlocked the cell and walked in, almost as if she was in her trance. Her eyes were filled with the murderous calm before the storm that Methos had seen so many times in the faces of his previous victims. It meant that whatever case he could try to plead, however many lives he had saved in the intervening millennia, whatever good he had tried so hard to produce, it was all meaningless to her. So he may as well not even bother.

“So what do you want?” he asked, his mouth enunciating the words carefully and deliberately. “Revenge, I’m guessing? You’d hardly be the first.”

“I know I’m not the first to try, not for a man like you,” the woman spat at Methos’s feet, and then before he could even blink she was crouching down before him, with the tip of a cutlass pressed against his neck. “But I will be the first to succeed.” He felt the sting of a puncture, and the trickle of blood drip down, staining the collar of his shirt. He kept his face impassive only through centuries of experience, but inside his heart was pounding fast enough to burst.

She could kill him right here, right now. It could all end, his entire life. No more books, no more Macleod, no more cold mornings with warm blankets, no more smelling the spring flowers in bloom, no more kisses, no more music. No more Methos.

It was a predicament he had been faced with many times before, but that never made it less terrifying. He didn’t want to die.

The sword was gone in a flash, and Methos slowly released the breath he had been holding. The woman took out a syringe in instead, and stuck it into his neck right above where the cutlass had been. Fucking great.

“But before I kill you, you will know my pain after the massacre. Alone, isolated, starving, so tired my legs were like lead and my feet bloody. Watching my brother wither away in front of me until the flies got him.” The woman was starting to swim in front of him, and Methos realized that he still didn’t know her name, but he supposed it didn’t matter. He felt his head yanked back, fingers pulling his hair so tight it brought tears to his eyes. “You will die many times before I end your life, I promise you that.”

The woman exited the cell and locked it, leaving Methos slumped against the cement as consciousness slowly left him once more. His lips stopped working again along with the rest of his body, but internally he was smiling. She made the same mistake so many others before her did. She gave him time.

He was given only the barest rations of food and water, every day less than the one before, and there was a pit in the corner for waste. All in all Methos had honestly been held in worse captivity, hell he had been treated worse by friends, and if she thought this was the first time he starved to death she was delusional.

Methos supposed that the real punishment was meant to be giving him time to think about his actions. Hours alone with nothing to do but replay every death of a child, every spatter of blood across an old man’s face, every cruel laugh he uttered before kicking a starving woman to the side. But he had spent hundreds of years doing exactly that, and even now hardly a week passed where he wasn’t jolted awake by those memories, sweating and breathing too hard to even cry out.

He would always be serving his penance.

In any case she was certainly no Kronos, digging under his skin and making him tremble, knowing him well enough to see to his core and assuring Methos that it was as rotten as ever. She was also no Macleod, with shame and betrayal enough to pierce Methos straight through, his eyes settling darkly upon him sometimes even now. She was nobody, not to Methos, and so instead of thinking about the past, Methos focused all his time awake on the future. He was going to get out of here.

There was no way out of the cell but the door, and the door was only open when she or one of her henchmen (the ones who must have kidnapped him in the first place, mortals with black ski masks covering their faces, pathetic really) opened it, so he would have to go through someone. The cuffs were tight and uncomfortable, but Houdini had been a close personal friend.

He knew he had to make it out before he died of hunger, because after that he would be too weak to go very far, and he also had to get out of the cell before they stabbed him with that damned needle because then he _really_ wouldn’t go very far, maybe only twenty feet before his legs collapsed. So he waited, and he conserved his strength and made the food stretch and on the fourth day he decided to make a break for it.

“You must’ve burned a thousand villages like ours.”

It was, unfortunately, the woman that day who came to bring him his meal. He would have preferred the mortals, who likely didn’t have a couple millennia of fighting experience, but he was determined to get out that day in either case.

Her lips were curled in a sneer, and her eyes were filled with a hatred Methos had seen a hundred times over in his life. If she hadn’t kidnapped him and threatened his life, he might have actually apologized.

“More like several thousand. We played at that game for a good millennia, you know.” He gave her a lopsided smile for effect and was a little impressed with her restraint when all she did in response was growl. She slid the small portion of mush over to him, barely a mouthful, and watched as he took his time swallowing. She flipped the capped syringe idly through her hands.

“A few more days and you won’t get to sleep, not anymore. Too weak to move, too weak to speak, you’ll flop around in that cell like a fish. The cold blooded animal you are. I will watch, and wait, and end you as you suffer.”

It was a speech Methos had heard before, and he was getting a little tired of it.

He nudged the empty bowl towards her to show he was done, and she unlocked the cell door and came towards him with the needle out and glistening. As the woman knelt on the ground she opened her mouth to say something cruel and biting no doubt, but she was interrupted by a large thump from upstairs and she looked up in bewilderment.

Methos took advantage of her momentary confusion to push himself off of the cement wall and ram into her, his shoulder driving the air out of her gut. She fell backwards and he charged over her, his arms dangling awkwardly behind him as he tried to dislocated a shoulder and get out of the manacles. He managed to get his right hand out by the time he reached the other side of the basement, his shoulder in pain but at least usable. He could hear the woman behind him, quicker on her feet than he was since she hadn’t been starved for the last few days.

Up above was another thump, and Methos didn’t know what was causing that but it had to be more promising than waiting in an underground jail cell to die, so he ran up the long, twisting stairs as quickly as he could, tripping when he felt a new Immortal presence and stopping dead in his tracks when he reached the top.

There in front of him, with his hair a little mussed, his shirt a little bloody, and two bodies at his feet, was Duncan Macleod. Looking just about as pissed off as Duncan Macleod could ever possibly be.

“Methos!”

“Mac?” Methos was aware that he was currently standing dumbly with his left shoulder still dislocated and his mouth wide open, but his brain was fuzzy with hunger and pain, and he could not remember being more surprised in his life. “What are you doing here?”

“You always need to ask me that, don’t you?” The tension in Mac’s face had decreased tenfold upon seeing Methos alive and breathing, and he almost put down his sword when a stab of incoming presence hit them and he hefted it back up again, guarding his neck and crouching into a fighter’s stance.

Methos whirled around just in time to see the woman come at him with the needle, but unfortunately not fast enough to dodge the attack, and he cursed as he felt the sharp sting of it puncturing his neck.

“By the time you wake up he’ll have been dead for hours,” the woman promised, then pushed him to the side as she drew out her cutlass. Mac tried to come for him but she blocked him, their swords ringing out as they clashed together. “I am owed his life, after what he took from me.”

“We’re all owed many things, it doesn’t mean we can take them,” Macleod replied, and if the room weren’t tilting so violently Methos would’ve asked what the fuck that was even supposed to mean. But instead he just tried to hold on to his wits and get out of the way as the fight started between the two Immortals.

He crawled along the wall until his legs collapsed, and then he fell heavily to the ground. The room was blurring a bit, and everything sounded tinny and far away, but he could see that Macleod and the women were fighting and… talking. They were talking. He wasn’t sure what they were talking about but it was probably him.

Duncan wouldn’t let him die, right? No matter what argument the woman made. He had had his chance before if he really wanted it. He said he wanted Methos to live.

And yet.

And yet.

Maybe he would?

Methos had done such… awful things… things Duncan could never know about… things this woman was repeating right now… maybe he would…

But, no. But, in the last moments of consciousness, Methos caught Duncan’s eye, caught it and stared at it and there was no hate. There was none of the cold fury from years before. Just a pressing need to take Methos far, far away from here. Even in the midst of battle they felt very warm, those eyes. Methos loved him.

So Methos settled down and slept, confident that when he woke up he would be gone from this wretched place.

It didn’t feel like an eternity this time.

Just a short nap.

He woke to find himself in the passenger seat of a car, speeding along next to a wildflower dappled field with the summer sun casting long shadows onto the road. Who knew such beauty was so close to that god awful pit in the ground.

“Welcome back,” Duncan said, and Methos grunted slightly in reply. “I would say you could keep resting until we got to the hotel, but I think maybe you’ve done enough of that lately.”

“Where are we?” Methos slurred, trying to connect the random wilderness to some area in his past.

“Danish countryside.”

“I don’t think we ever even made it to Denmark,” Methos muttered, trying to figure out why the woman had brought him here, but even as he said it he knew the way Duncan’s shoulders would tense in response. “We” was always a bad term to use when referring to the horsemen. Mac frowned without taking his eyes off the road ahead of them.

“Well, clearly you must have. Her village was not twenty miles from here, she said.” Methos could see Mac’s hackles raising, so to speak, and the pure relief that had swept through him earlier at seeing Methos’s head attached to his body was quickly being replaced by his particular brand of steaming anger, though anger at what specifically Methos didn’t know. He remained silent, waiting for the inevitable burst, and was wholly unsurprised when that vein jumped out in Mac’s forehead and he turned off to the side of the road.

Unsurprised, but also unhappy. Methos really just wanted a hot meal and a bath right now.

“Mac…” Methos started, about to actually beg to stop off at a MacDonald’s before Duncan threw his tantrum – surely they must have invaded Scandinavia by now – but Macleod cut him off.

“No. Don’t start.” Mac tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “For someone who is always warning me to be careful you sure pulled a hell of a stunt.” He turned to look at Methos and his eyes were flashing red. “What the hell were you thinking?”

That he had wanted to avoid exactly this.

“I was thinking that this was my business, not yours, and I would deal with it,” Methos replied calmly.

“Oh, yeah, deal with it…” Mac rolled his eyes. “Deal with it how, exactly? By getting captured? By having your head lopped off?”

“No,” Methos gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to just get out of the car and walk away. Mostly because he wasn’t sure his legs would hold him up. “I had a plan. I don’t know if you noticed, but I was actually in the middle of my breakout when you showed up.”

“You really thought you were going to make it past those two thugs on your own? Methos you were a wreck even before she stuck that needle in you.”

“I’m five thousand years old, Macleod, I’ve gotten out of situations like that on my own before.” Honestly from the way Mac was acting you would think Methos hadn’t even known how to tie his shoes before he came along. He had survived just fine beforehand and he would survive long afterwards, thank you very much.

“I don’t care about before!” Mac roared, which really pissed Methos off because that’s what he always says and then he ends up getting crucified for it. Why does Duncan always get to pick and choose when the past is important? He felt his blood run hot and his vision blur with anger, but before he could open his mouth and say something he would admittedly probably regret, his stomach rolled and released a large growl.

The sound seemed to reverberate off the car walls, and everything suddenly grew quiet. Duncan stared at him, his eyebrows knitted together not in rage but in concern, like he wasn’t looking at the world’s oldest man but instead something very small and very human, and Methos felt his anger dissipate, leaving him tired and hungry and a little empty. He wanted to go home.

“Mac…” Methos tried again, but Mac sighed and held up a hand.

“Wait, just wait.” He took Methos’s hands in his and rubbed his thumbs across the backs, the warm friction feeling comfortable and safe. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I was really scared this time, Methos. I didn’t feel any presence in the building at first and I…” Mac’s thumbs stopped rubbing and his grip on Methos’s hands tightened in a way that almost hurt, but it was a good hurt. “What I meant to say is that you shouldn’t _have_ to deal with it on your own. Not anymore. This is what we do now, we work together. You’ve been there for me, and I’m there for you.”

Methos was quiet for a moment, letting Mac’s words settle in his head and letting his hands be warmed up by the perpetual heat that was Duncan Macleod. Finally he spoke.

“Can we please get some MacDonald’s? They were literally trying to starve me to death back there.” He could tell that wasn’t the response Duncan necessarily wanted to hear at the moment, but he wasn’t done working out the words in his head, wasn’t done sorting out the sordid maze of his emotions, and in the meantime a man had to eat.

“Sure.”

Two quarter pounders and a large fries later they were in Mac’s hotel, which Methos should have known was not going to be much more than a quaint bed and breakfast instead of the five-star deluxe luxury resort he had been hoping for. Mac threw his coat over Methos as they made their way inside, but the old woman who ran the place wouldn’t stop giving him disturbed glances. Methos had to assume it had something to do with his smell, which was very ripe. It was flattering that Duncan still wanted to stand this close to him.

“Maybe we should just burn my clothes,” Methos said, holding his sweater away from him a little disdainfully. It used to be white.

“Don’t be silly,” Mac called back, and Methos heard a tap twist and the sound of running water from the bathroom. “I’ll ask Frederikke if I can do a wash tomorrow.” He stepped into the room to see Methos gingerly discarding the rest of his clothing and frowning at the sweat and grime on them. “You would think you’d forgotten what it was like to live before modern sanitation.”

“How could anyone forget that smell?” Methos shuddered. “No, I just don’t care to relive it.” He followed Duncan back into the small bathroom where a steaming hot bath was waiting for him, and even just the sight of it made Methos want to melt. “I could kiss you.”

“I’ll take it,” Mac smiled and Methos gave him a peck on the cheek before nearly wiping out trying to get into the bath on his own. "Still a little shaky..." he muttered as he grabbed onto Duncan's arm for support, which if it were anyone else would have been incredibly embarrassing but it was just Duncan so it was okay. He’d seen him much worse than this.

As the hot water enveloped his body Methos couldn’t help releasing a groan, which turned into a full out moan when Mac began scrubbing shampoo into his hair. Gods above that felt good. Duncan always had such a way with his hands. Methos closed his eyes and rested against the side of the tub, drifting in and out of consciousness in a way that was no longer terrifying. It couldn’t be, not with Duncan there.

“How did you know where to find me?” Methos asked, the words a bit of an effort to form in his relaxed state, but the question one he had to know the answer to. “You don’t usually come after me like that when I… wander off.”

“Not when _you_ wander off, no. Lean forward,” Mac said, pushing gently at Methos’s back and pouring a bucket of water over his head once he complied to wash the shampoo out. “But when Ellis Marks goes missing unexpectedly I know there’s a problem. You’re never that sloppy.”

“How did you know, oh, yes that’s good, right there…” Methos sighed as Mac’s hands wandered across his shoulders, massaging soap into his skin. “How did you know Ellis Marks was missing? He doesn’t even live in the same state as you.”

Methos felt Duncan’s hands still for just a moment, and he could perfectly imagine the look on his face then. Two parts embarrassed and one part indignant. He wanted to kiss him again but at the moment he didn’t think he could move.

“Your office called, they were worried that you hadn't shown up. You put me down as your emergency contact, remember?” Duncan lied as smoothly as he could, which wasn’t very, and even if Methos couldn’t hear it in his voice he would know it wasn’t true. He would never in a million years cross his lives like that, which meant that Duncan must’ve swiped his new-hire paperwork when he wasn’t looking. Methos wanted to be angry about it, and maybe he would be tomorrow, but for now Mac’s hands were moving lower, kneading the tense muscles of his lower back, and Methos just felt very loved.

Which is maybe why he said what he said next.

“I didn’t want you to know."

“Huh?” the hands stopped.

“I didn’t want you to know about my past,” Methos said again, his eyes still closed because that was the only way he could have this conversation. “I never wanted you to know. Not about any of it. Duncan I… You’re so…” Methos stopped, already too exposed. It felt like he had carved his chest wide open in front of the other Immortal, and if he went any deeper right now he would die.

“But I do know about it,” Mac said, and Methos felt his heart stop for a moment before wet soapy fingers grabbed his chin and turned his face, forcing him to look Duncan in the eye. “I’m not going to pretend it’s always easy for me to reconcile the, uh… the two of you,” and Methos wanted to say that there was only one of him but he remained silent. “But Methos, I took that woman’s head today just because she wanted to kill you, and I didn’t feel sorry, not really.” He lied again, the shaking of Mac’s hand against his face told Methos that the decision to kill wasn’t as easy as he was making it seem. But he still did it. “I know, I’ve known for years now, and I’m still here. I’ve always been here, and I always will be when you need me.”

“As long as I don’t turn evil again,” Methos said, making his tone light on purpose so it would come across as a joke, even though it wasn’t, and Duncan laughed but didn’t deny it, which was exactly what Methos wanted to hear. That was one lie he couldn’t have stomached right now.

He reached a wet hand up to pull Duncan’s head down into a kiss, threading his fingers through his hair and tugging just a little bit. Duncan leaned into it instantly, opening his mouth and flicking his tongue out just a little bit. It was a good kiss, but then they were always good kisses. They kissed on the side of the tub for what felt like hours, days, weeks. The heat went right down to Methos’s toes, and he kicked a foot in the water a little helplessly. He forgot everything but the softness of Duncan’s mouth, and the touch of his fingertips against his check, but when he slowly started to sink back into the water and drag him along he felt Mac pull back suddenly.

“Oh no, you’re not pulling me into that tub with you.”

“You’ve never minded before,” Methos said, pouting only a little bit and leaning back in a way he knew was particularly alluring.

“That water is filthy and I’m not getting in it,” Mac replied resolutely. “C’mon, get up. It’s my turn – I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’m not exactly clean myself.” It was true, Macleod did have a lingering presence of blood on his person, so Methos allowed himself to be hauled out of the tub and wrapped in a towel.

“You want me to scrub your back for you?” Methos asked while Macleod stripped in front of him. He ran a hand across Duncan’s bare back just because he could and it felt good. Because he hadn’t lost this yet. Duncan turned around and backed Methos into the wall, which wasn’t difficult to do in a bathroom this small, and pinned him between his hands.

“No,” he said, his voice low in his throat, almost a purr. “You,” he nipped Methos’s nose, “are going to go wait on the bed,” he kissed Methos’s jaw, “while I,” traveled down to his neck, sucking lightly, “take a quick shower,” finished with a bite to his collar bone, “the quickest ever.”

“Okay,” Methos said, a little breathless and at this point willing to let Duncan have it his way. In the end it really must’ve been the quickest shower ever, because Methos didn’t think more than a minute and a half had passed before a naked Duncan pounced on him, grabbing his wrists and covering Methos’s mouth with his own.

Methos loved this, loved the way their bodies fit together, the way Macleod knew all the places to make him groan and sigh, the way that he could make Duncan shout his name. As with every person Methos had ever loved, it was a heaven he wasn’t always sure he deserved, but he was going to take it anyways.

“You know,” Mac said, panting a little but smiling,“this means I won’t be able to let you out of my sight for a while- ouch!” he accidentally knocked his head against the wall slightly as Methos moved against him, and Methos winced in sympathy before he moved the same way again, the friction between them delicious enough that Mac obviously soon forgot about the pain in favor of the pleasure.

“I’m not going anywhere any time soon,” Methos promised, and in that moment he meant it too.

Mac always turned his head just slightly when he came, his eyes always closed and lips parted in a silent sigh of pleasure. The remnants of a puritanical past, maybe, or perhaps just pure instinct. Regardless, it was a gesture which Methos only found more endearing over time and he couldn’t stop himself from leaning down and placing a kiss on Duncan’s forehead before finishing himself off.

He hadn’t thought he would ever want to sleep again, but he found his eyelids drooping in the post-orgasmic bliss. However he was still awake enough to feel Mac pull him close to his chest, and whisper.

“I’m so glad I found you,” and Methos didn’t know if he meant today or if he meant fifteen years ago, but he burrowed his face into Mac’s chest hair so it was muffled when he said,

“Me too.”

The nightmare wasn’t anything Methos hadn’t experienced before. Faces gray and fly covered, bodies broken and bloody, villages burnt and children crying. Not only the victims of his rampages, but also every patient he lost and every slave he couldn’t save. The woman was there this time, staring at him with hard eyes and no name to remember her by. As always, Kronos and Caspian and Silas and worst of all Methos smiling through it all.

Only the smell in this one, the smell was more foul, more overpowering, more _present_ than any dream Methos could remember. It made it all real. He woke up gasping for fresh air, his body shivering and covered in sweat as if he had a high fever. Even in the dark he could tell Mac was looking at him, though Mac usually slept through his nightmares.

“…Do you want to talk about it?” Duncan asked, an offer he had never made before, an offer which Methos had truly never wanted him to make.

“Not really,” Methos admitted. “I just… I want…” He broke off, unsure how to finish the sentence. He felt Macleod lean forward, their breaths mingling together in the night air for a moment, and then he was being kissed, slowly and chastely.

“I’m right here,” Mac said, throwing an arm around Methos’s waist and pulling him close. “You’re right here.” He tucked his face against Methos’s neck, lips pressed against his pulse. “We’re together,” he whispered. Which was exactly what Methos wanted.

“I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have many thoughts on how Methos deals with horsemen stuff, and how it affects him and Mac together, this chapter only really scratches the surface of that all. But I was definitely influenced by what felt like not a lack of remorse necessarily, but a complete lack of real apology to Cassandra who I'm pretty sure deserved a lot more than an apology so. Yeah this was influenced by that. 
> 
> This is unrelated to anything going on in this fic but you know there's that line in Indiscretions where Methos says "maybe I was a slave" and I think a lot of people have taken that to mean that he was, actually, indeed a slave which is certainly possible but he also had slaves (like Cassandra) and I wonder if it's that he just can't admit that without being embarrassed, but it is actually his slaveowning past that he is trying to make up for by being a doctor for slaves. I have no idea it's really not that important.


	5. I'm 2015 for a moment, caught in between 10 and 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Have you talked to him lately?” Amanda asked, and even though he knew, he knew this was going to happen the moment Amanda answered her phone earlier, Methos felt his whole body tense up in response anyways.
> 
> “Last I heard he and Gabe were on some sort of student-teacher tour of the world together.” A tour which maybe Methos should have been invited on, because Gabe had really been a sort of co-parenting venture, but he hadn’t been asked for obvious reasons. He wouldn’t have gone anyways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not going to let this thing die a WIP. It will get finished. The last chapter will happen.

** 2015 **

“Been on any hot dates recently?” Amanda waggled her eyebrows at him and Methos nearly closed the chat window in response, except then her face started to pixelate and he got distracted.

“Could you take two steps backwards?”

“Don’t dodge the question,” Amanda said, stepping backwards anyways and pixelating again. Methos sighed. His company could hardly boast the best video-chat app on the market if just something like being on a private island in the South Pacific could screw it up. He’d have to set one of his engineers on it.

“I’m not dodging the question, I’m just doing my job,” Methos said and pointedly held up his notepad. “Which you agreed to help out with, you’ll remember. ‘Oh Methos, talk to me with your app! I live in the middle of nowhere, it’ll be perfect!’ Perfect for you to bother me about stupid things.”

“I thought I might unearth some reasonably good gossip,” Amanda said, huffing as if to blow a strand of hair of off her face, which Methos knew was just for effect because her hair was immaculate as always.

“I’m rich and reclusive,” Methos muttered, “anything I do is gossip.” 

“Well it’s not like you’re William Randolph Hearst.”

“No, you’re right, he was an even bigger bastard than I am.”

“I just meant that you’re not quite that interesting,” Amanda said as she moved down the beach again, the phone bobbing lightly up and down in her grip. Her hair was dyed a deep blue color and it shone like sapphires in the sun, which Methos was sure was the intended effect as sapphires had always been Amanda’s favorite. Diamond fads come and go with the centuries, but sapphires were forever expensive.

“If I’m not that interesting why do you keep asking about my love life?” Methos pointed out as he opened the diagnostic panel and ran a test on the app again. If he could just figure out the area of the problem he could go home early. And then do what? Read. Listen to some music. Maybe write in his journals, he’d been neglecting them lately.

He really was boring.

“I meant interesting to others. To mortals. You know you’re always interesting to me, darling,” and then Amanda gave Methos that smile she’d been giving him for the past year and a half. A little too pitying, a little too warm and too intimate, and most of all far too understanding. Methos met her gaze for just a moment before he yanked his eyes down and pretended to scribble in his notebook again, pointedly saying nothing. Amanda’s sigh of frustration crackled out of the speakers. “Well, if you’re not going to tell me about your life, you could at least ask me about mine.”

“I’m sorry, what did we just spend the past ten minutes doing?”

“Updating you on all the Immortals I’ve seen recently for your records isn’t the same as asking me about my life, Methos.”

“Hey!” Methos glanced around his office quickly, even though he knew it was empty and practically sound proof. Being the boss had its perks. “Not at work!” he hissed.

“Sorry, _Ellis_.” She was wearing reflective sunglasses but Methos could still tell that Amanda was rolling her eyes at him. “God, it’s not like anyone’s even in the room with you-“ Which was, of course, the moment the door to his office opened. Without even a knock. He really needed to get some politer employees. Or maybe just fire this particular one.

 “Ellis?” It was Jordan, the head of development on his company’s new fitness app. Methos narrowed his eyes at her and she narrowed hers right back. “The progress meeting on the app is starting in ten minutes. We sort of need the head of the company to actually show up this time.”

“Yeah, fine, don’t worry. I’ll be there.” Methos shooed her away, but still she didn’t move, just kept her eyes trained on him and waited. He hit mute on the computer before Amanda’s laughter could be heard. “Really, I will be there. I promise.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” Jordan smiled and it was clearly a smile that promised professional pain should Methos not keep his word. He eyed her carefully as she left the room, and then looked down at the computer to see that Amanda was holding the camera way too close to her immaculate face, clearly giving him a _look_. “What?”

“She’s very pretty.”

Gods. Not again.

“You couldn’t even see her.”

“No, but I could hear her, and she sounded pretty.”

The truth was that Jordan _was_ very pretty, in a way that actually reminded Methos of Amanda. In other words, she looked a little dangerous and seemed to promise not only mind-blowing sex but life-blowing felonies as well. She was a brilliant programmer, a more than competent manager, and Methos couldn’t imagine letting her go even if she did do things like enter without knocking, but he also wasn’t entirely sure he trusted her not to steal the hens from the henhouse.

“Well, I’m her boss, and I also think she wants to murder me, so that would be an HR nightmare,” Methos said. “Anyways, she’s not my type.”

“Your type is anyone with a cute smile and a good butt, and somehow I bet she qualifies.” Amanda laughed and Methos couldn’t exactly deny it, his track record so far was against him. “Ask her out.”

“No, thank you.”

“Ugh, you’re such a bore. I can tell she’s into you.”

“You can’t because she isn’t… Is she?”

“Yup. Believe me, I know these things.

The diagnostic finished running its course and Methos glanced over the results before sending them off to someone lower on the ladder than him. Which was basically anyone. Hopefully they’d earn their paycheck and tell him what was wrong with the damn thing. Once he’d sent off the email he realized he hadn’t heard anything from Amanda for a while, and he looked back at the chat window to make sure she hadn’t just temporarily drowned in the ocean. It had happened to the two of them about a year ago on a spectacularly terrible and alcoholic night in Hong Kong.

Amanda wasn’t drowning in the ocean, but sitting on the sand and staring silently at Methos, her sunglasses raised and her eyes far too intent. He knew what was coming next. He knew what subject would come up any time he spoke to Amanda or Joe. And they wondered why he avoided them lately. You didn’t necessarily lose friends in a break up. People don’t always have to pick sides. But sometimes it’s even worse when they don’t.

“Have you talked to him lately?” Amanda asked, and even though he knew, _he knew_ this was going to happen the moment Amanda answered her phone earlier, Methos felt his whole body tense up in response anyways.

“Last I heard he and Gabe were on some sort of student-teacher tour of the world together.” A tour which maybe Methos should have been invited on, because Gabe had really been a sort of co-parenting venture, but he hadn’t been asked for obvious reasons. He wouldn’t have gone anyways.

“Metho- I mean, Ellis. They came back six months ago. He’s up in Seacouver again, though god knows why.”

Methos shrugged. So what? It didn’t matter to him. He didn’t care what Macleod did with his time. If he needed Methos, he’d ask for him and Methos would come. In the meantime he could go fall off a cliff if he wanted too. (Methos really hoped he didn’t fall off any cliff).

“Well it’s not like I keep tabs on him anymore. Not exactly my job.”

“But aren’t you still friends?” Amanda asked, and she sounded a little bit pained, which Methos thought was unfair. Only he got to feel pain about this situation. She could go fuck Mac whenever she liked without a care in the world. If Methos wanted to fuck Duncan they’d both probably have to be especially drunk and particularly maudlin, and they would fight about it in the morning. This was his problem, not hers.

They _were_ still friends though. Technically. They had promised each other that on the morning when it all ended, after a night of rough and unhappy sex and a very silent breakfast. They would still be friends, that was the deal. “I will always be there if you need me,” Duncan had said, and so Methos had spent the past eighteen months trying his best not to need him. By all accounts it sounded like Mac had done the same. The space between them was as silent and empty as the tundra, and Methos found himself shivering at odd times during the day. But the cold makes one strong.

(Methos missed him. He needed him. But no one had to know that.)

“I think you of all people know that ‘friends’ means something different to people like us,” Methos looked at his watch, he still had a couple of minutes before Jordan’s meeting. “I’m sure you’ve gone centuries without seeing some of your friends.”

“It’s different with Duncan,” Amanda’s voice was soft, and the look in her eyes brought Methos back to a memory many years ago, back when he barely knew her. That breathless quality of love she held for Duncan Macleod that seemed so unobtainable and now was as familiar as dying. “You know that.”

“Don’t mistake the two of us for the two of you. We were never the same,” Methos grumbled, because if they were the same then “break-up” would probably never have entered his vocabulary. Not this time. But that was the wrong thing to say apparently because any of the sympathy Amanda had felt for him earlier immediately vanished from her face, and her eyes turned hard.

“ _Excuse me_? Are you trying to say that you two were somehow better than we were?” Amanda’s voice was calm and bordering on neutral, which was always a little terrifying.

For one peevish moment Methos wanted to say yes, they were in fact better. That the two of them were special, and that he and Duncan had shared a love Amanda could only dream of. That even Tessa could only dream of. But that would have been a lie. A big one. And since the break-up (he hated that word, really, so pedestrian) Methos had been trying to maintain a measure of honesty in his life. At least with the people who mattered.

“No,” Methos shook his head slowly, and locked eyes with Amanda until he saw her visibly relax. “I’m just saying we were different. The way you and Duncan work… we couldn’t have that. Every time I came back the fights were worse… every time we disagreed about something we… It just wasn’t working.” Methos sighed, that old familiar depression and disappointment creeping up on him again. They hadn’t worked. That was the end of it. Neither of them were particularly bendable men, and ultimately neither of them had wanted to break.

Amanda moved her hand in a way that implied a patting motion, as if to say that were she in the office with him she would have been petting his hair. Methos imagined the touch of soft fingers smoothing it down and suddenly missed her fiercely. Maybe he would take a vacation to her island soon.

“You never know,” she said, offering the type of hope that Methos despised, “Duncan will be the first to tell you that when something doesn’t work you just start again from the beginning and try until it does. It’s the only way he gets any of his appliances working in that crappy apartment of his.” If only Duncan had taken is own advice, Methos thought bitterly.

“I think I do know this time.” Methos looked out his window to the ships circling the San Francisco Bay, the weather still warm enough for sailing in mid-autumn. The ships were just little dots of white against the large, large blue. One day that’s what this relationship would be to him. A little dot of white in the blue of his life. But in the meantime he was still wrapped up in the sail and it hurt.

“God,” Amanda snapped back to her old unforgiving self. “Just stop looking so sad and lonely, okay? What are you, some sort of renaissance model?”

“I mean, I was.”

“We’ll have to compare notes about that someday. Look,” Amanda said. “Either make up with Mac or give that girl a call, but if you keep going like this we’re going to have a repeat of Hong Kong, and I can only come back to life coughing up sea water so many times.”

“I make no promises to anyone,” Methos said, and then looked down at his watch again. “I’ve got to run, or Jordan will actually murder me this time, and she’s the last person I want to explain immortality to when I wake back up.”

“Jordan – she even has a cute name.” Amanda laughed at Methos’s frown and then blew him a kiss. “You take care of yourself, darling. Please.”

“You know me, it’s what I do best.”

The meeting was boring, just like Methos knew it would be, and glancing at Jordan throughout it put him in a sour mood. He could feel himself losing interest in his company day by day, the thrill of coding a new product dropping lower and lower as the money rolling in grew to staggering heights. The culture was changing. The market was changing. It was no longer about putting something new and exciting out there. About changing the human race. It was about making money. Methos had seen it happen before, dozens of times, and he could feel that the time to get out was close at hand.

 But it was always hard to complain about his job once he came back home to the penthouse apartment that it paid for. It cost more than a castle in France, and would have made Adam Pierson cry himself to sleep with delirious happiness compared to that ratty old apartment in Paris. “The house that cellphones built,” Mac had called it once and then they had sex pressed up against the glass wall, facing the lights of the city. A memory once precious and now thoroughly rotten.

What right did Amanda have to be giving him dating advice about Duncan anyway? To be hinting that maybe, maybe they could turn it around, come back together? Like Methos wouldn’t do exactly that if he thought that they could. She didn’t know the way their arguments had gone from abstract morality to the way Methos rinsed a plate in the sink. She hadn’t heard the creaming about trivial things and the dark silences about everything else. The way Macleod had looked at him when Methos admitted one night that he didn’t really care who died as long as Macleod lived, or the way Methos had nearly drawn his sword when Mac kept _pushing pushing pushing_. She hadn’t felt terrifying pulse in Methos’s throat when he had thought about being someone else’s eternity.

Why should I listen to her about anything? Methos thought as he trudged through his empty apartment, not even bothering to turn on the lights. He grabbed some leftover pasta from the night before, and sat down at his computer. The light from the screen hurt his eyes a little after the dark of his apartment.

They were better off this way, no matter what Amanda thought. Even if Methos did miss him with such an ache in his heart it made him feel like throwing up. One day he would be thankful for this pain. They would remember how to be friends. They would find new lovers. Those thirteen years would become fond memories. They would be happy again. And when the day came for Macleod to take Methos’s head, maybe he wouldn’t even hesitate. Methos would give a lot for that.

So why was Methos staring at an email with Mac’s address as the recipient?

_I hear you’re back in the country. Seacouver again, is it? I hope you had a good time with Gabe. Tell the little jerk I say hello. Also might want to keep your whereabouts a bit more secret in the future, or you’ll have someone after you in no time. You always do._

It had been sitting in Methos’s drafts for months, waiting to be sent. Every night Methos would open it up, change a line here or there. Did he sound too fond? Did he sound too desperate? Did he sound too aloof? Finally his mouse would hover above the send button, and he wouldn’t click it.

He was aware it was a little pathetic.

He stared at the screen as he slurped his pasta, idly wishing it were Mac’s famous Bolognese instead of whatever cheap stuff he was eating from the place around the corner. If this was two years ago, Mac would _look_ at him in the way that he always did and saunter over and lick a bit of sauce from the corner of Methos’s mouth. And then maybe they would have sex. Or maybe they would get drunk and play chess. Or maybe watch a movie together. Or maybe do nothing but sit and look at the stars.

Or maybe they would have some sort of screaming match about an Immortal who showed up at Methos’s office who ended the day without a head and it would end with Methos breaking a plate and Mac throwing that mouth-watering Bolognese in the garbage.

Methos let out a sigh and looked out his window to the lights of San Francisco, the memory for earlier returning and making his hands hot. Amanda didn’t know what she was talking about, but that didn’t necessarily make her wrong about everything, Methos had to admit. Grudgingly. Because as bad as it got, sitting in his empty apartment Methos had to admit that being with someone who might hate you was better than being alone (and he didn’t think Duncan ever truly hated him – that was the real tragedy, they could never be that to each other).

God damn Mac for making him feel that way. It wasn’t fair. But who ever said life was fair?

So Methos could…

Try.

“I better not fucking hate myself in the morning,” Methos muttered, typing a few words before he finally hit send. Of course as soon as the email blinked away he hated himself and experienced a sincere moment of extreme panic. He almost hacked in to delete it, but then he knew not only would that be noticed, but it would also appear far more incriminating and pathetic than his email already was. So he let it be.

-          _I hope you’re happy_

He texted Amanda and her response came back straight away.

-          _YOU TALKED TO DUNCAN???????_

-          _No…_

-          _Oh. Office girl????_

-          _Yup. Asked her out to lunch. Happy?_

-          _YES!! What about your hr field day tho?_

-          _I’ll figure it out._

It was technically a business lunch, to discuss the new fitness app, so nothing HR could get upset about at the moment. Looking over his notes from the meeting Methos decided he did have some ideas to contribute after all. And maybe they could go from there, if she was interested.

Methos looked at the unsent email to Duncan, silently mocking him from the drafts folder. It would come, eventually. He would send it, and get a reply, and they would get somewhere approaching normal. Just not today. Not yet. His heart hurt thinking about it.

So he refreshed the page and waited.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is my honest true headcanon for duncan/methos. they break up sometime after 10 but before 20 years of dating. they absolutely do not getting right the first time. and i think about 10 years is the point where methos goes "oh my god he's not going to die oh my god *he's not going to die*" 
> 
> i think in retrospect i made the previous chapters seem too sweet and perfect, but i hope i dropped enough little things to show that they weren't necessarily always on the same page even if they weren't fighting onscreen yet. 
> 
> for instance methos really did get pissed about that whole "hey i stole your new hire paperwork" thing duncan pulled.
> 
> anywho be back when i can


	6. I've got that 2020 vision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Duncan’s heart pattered helplessly at the sight of Methos. But then he glanced at the clock and sighed. They didn’t have time for him take pleasure in life’s sweet nothings; they had to meet with the realtor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look. It's here. I did it. It's over.

** 2020 **

There was a weight on his chest that was slowly killing him. Each breath came shallower than the last, and he could feel it bearing down upon him, squeezing his ribs and ripping the air away from his lungs. He tried to panic but couldn’t move, his arms and legs were pinned down and paralyzed and everything was hot hot too hot, causing sweat to slide across his skin and drip into his eyes. He didn’t have his sword, didn’t have any cover, and he was going to die here, vulnerable and exposed. He was going to…

Duncan’s eyes snapped open and he was suddenly, startlingly awake. A dream. It was just a dream. He tried to draw in a large breath to calm himself down but found that he couldn’t quite get the air. The heavy weight was still upon him and the heat was enough to burn him up. What…?

Methos.

He was spread across Macleod like frosting on a cake; his face pushed against Duncan’s neck, one arm tucked around his side with the other flung out to the left, an ankle hooked around his leg, and finally his chest crushing into Duncan’s with every expanding breath. It could not possibly have been comfortable, in fact it rather looked like Methos might be breaking his wrist just to maintain this type of close contact, and yet of course he was sleeping soundly. And drooling slightly, Duncan noticed with a grimace.

He needed to use the bathroom, and even more importantly he needed to breathe, but there was a part of Macleod that wanted to let the moment linger anyways. To just watch Methos’s back rise and fall with each breath, breathe in the smell of his hair and savor the way his drool was currently dripping down Duncan’s neck.

Okay, Duncan amended silently, maybe not the drool thing, but it was so rare to see Methos like this. Calm but not calculating, still but not anticipating. Methos could be at ease, and was often downright lazy, but there was a tension in his movements that hinted at the million thoughts and emotions and experiences roiling below the surface. It was nice to see him so unguarded, and Duncan’s heart pattered helplessly at the sight. But then he glanced at the clock and sighed. They didn’t have time for him take pleasure in life’s sweet nothings; they had to meet with the realtor.

“Methos.”

“Mm?” Methos shifted slightly, his lips ghosting over Mac’s skin.

“No, Methos,” Duncan pushed against Methos’s shoulder. “You need to wake up.”

“Hmmm??” And Methos was awake now, Mac could feel him grin against his skin before he nipped lightly, and then bit down hard on his shoulder, causing Duncan to yelp.

“Get _off_.” Mac shoved Methos off the bed where plopped onto the ground laughing so hard Duncan could see tears in his eyes. He tried scowling for maybe half a second, but he couldn’t quite hide his smile, and when Methos crawled back onto the bed and gave him a messy kiss with a little too much tongue and teeth Duncan let him. Morning breath and all.

“Morning,” Methos said when he pulled back, and maybe it was cheesy, but that was when Duncan thought Methos looked the most beautiful. His hair out of its usual careful coif and thoroughly bedraggled, his pale cheeks flushed with the warmth of two bodies, and his eyes still soft with sleep. He looked very vulnerable, and he was. His sword wasn’t even within reaching distance of the bed.

“We’re going to be late if you don’t hurry up,” Mac held up his phone and pointedly showed Methos the time. However he was entirely unsurprised when Methos threw it onto bed and hauled Duncan to his feet, the momentum bringing them chest to chest again.

“We can be a little late...” Methos murmured as he kissed Duncan’s neck.

“I know you haven’t gone out and bought your own house in over a century, but trust me, we can’t.” Duncan smiled as the kisses grew more insistent, knowing he had one more card to play. “But if you’ve changed your mind, that’s fine, we can just keep living here… on the barge…”

“Ugh, fine.” Methos pulled away and headed off towards the shower “Why don’t you get breakfast started instead? I’ll take my eggs sunny side up, please.”

“I know how you take your eggs, and you just hold on a second and let me pee first.”

At the stove Duncan tried to collect his thoughts. He had a list of criteria written down on his phone concerning extra space and lighting and outlets and perks in the surrounding neighborhood, but was there anything else…?

Well, there was the whole issue of ‘going out and buying a place to live with Methos’ which, while it was something he had agreed to, wasn’t something he really understood yet. Duncan thought they had been happy on the barge these past few months, he thought they were finally living the life they had always wanted together. But then one night in bed Methos suddenly put down the book he had been reading, looked up at Mac, and said,

“I want to move.”

Duncan had felt his chest grow heavy with disappointment, and his ears flush with embarrassment at Methos’s words. He really thought they had figured it out this time, but as usual Methos was leaving him blindsided and strung out along the highway. He turned away from the other Immortal’s solemn gaze. He couldn’t have that conversation and look Methos in the eye. Not without breaking down in a fit of anger or sadness.

“Okay,” Duncan said quietly, and the word had a bitter taste on his tongue. Like cyanide. “You can stay here until you find a new place, of course, but…”

“What? No, no, I meant _with_ you, not away from you.” Duncan’s head shot up and he could feel his mouth slightly agape and his cheeks hot. He’d just assumed… and he was wrong. He was not a man who was often wrong. For once, it was a good feeling. “Gods, Mac, the look on your face you’d think I just asked you to chop my head off. I just don’t want us to live on a boat anymore, that alright?” Methos started to get a little grumpy, but Duncan knew by the tone of his voice and that particular wrinkle in his forehead that he was really just embarrassed.

“Okay,” Duncan said again, the word spilling out of his mouth so fast he wasn’t sure it was even intelligible. “I’ll get my Parisian realtor on the phone tomorrow.” He hadn’t even completely processed the idea of packing up his barge and moving into a new house – a new house with Methos of all people, and the mountains of baggage both physical and emotional he would bring – but there was a deep fear within him that if he didn’t grab this chance right this moment that he might never have it again.

Methos had been sleeping steadily at his side for the past six months seemingly without any intention of ever leaving, and yet Duncan still woke up sometimes expecting to be alone with nothing but a note left in the middle of the night. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t something that Duncan would ever admit to Methos, but Immortals have long memories, and Immortals can tend to get stuck in ruts. Some habits never die. So he agreed.

Duncan’s only conditions were that they stay in Paris, and that they actually meet with his realtor and view apartments and sign papers. He had never liked the shady emails Methos sent in the middle of the night that somehow earned him a house the next day, the name on the bill of sale obscured and discreet money tucked away into the pockets of strange men and women. Buying the house was half of owning the house, in Duncan’s opinion, and if they were going to do this they were going to do it right.

But what if the whole thing was wrong?

“You’re burning the eggs,” Methos said in Duncan’s ear, causing him to jump slightly. “Aren’t you supposed to be some great cook?”

“Better than you, at least.” Duncan said as he slid the eggs onto a plate already containing some toast and a cup of fage. “I think I already proved that several times over.”

“Hmm.” Methos hummed through a spoonful of yogurt. “I’m over five thousand years old, there’s no telling what talents and skills I’ve forgotten about.”

“I’m pretty sure cooking isn’t one of them,” Duncan replied, but his heart wasn’t really in the retort. He was still caught up in his thoughts about the move. Sure, there was the excitement of something new awaiting him, the anticipation of details to sort out and maybe some cabinets to redesign, but there was also…

Nostalgia. Regret. Loss. He loved his barge, with its gentle sway and unrivaled views. It had been stripped down and burned and repainted and rebuilt and redecorated countless times, but the bones were the same. Just like Duncan. It had been a constant in his life for decades, a reminder of Tessa and a respite from his problems. To let it go was… difficult, to say the least. Especially when he didn’t really understand the reason why.

“You okay there?” Methos asked him, showing a little bit of concern.

“Just thinking, we have a long day ahead of us.” Duncan stood up and stretched, wondering idly as he always did what it would be like to get old and hear his bones crack and groan with the stress of his years instead of the single healthy pop he always got. “I’m going to go clean up and put some clothes on, and then we’ll leave, okay? We’re already pushing it.”

“Hmm.” Methos said through another bite of yogurt.

Duncan headed outside before Methos had finished up breakfast and waited on the deck. He could see a light dusting of snow along the tops of the buildings and all of the streets, it must have fallen during the night. First snow of the season. Mac took a deep breath and let the cold air settle in his lungs, then let it out after a count of three. He supposed that no matter where he was or how he lived, at least the cold felt like home.

 “Hey, we’re going to be late!” Methos said as he emerged from the barge and strolled past Mac onto the banks. Duncan rolled his eyes and jogged to catch up. Within minutes of being outside the cold was working wonders on Methos’s face, turning his nose and cheeks a bright red. Duncan couldn’t help but chuckle slightly.

“Hey, Rudolph,” Duncan said, slipping his arm around Methos’s waist and drawing him closer, hoping some of his residual body heat would make a difference.

“I thought I told you not to call me that,” Methos grumbled, but he was smirking as he said it and he settled in closer to Duncan’s side, his head leaning briefly against the shoulder he bit an hour earlier.

“Did you actually put together a list of questions for the realtor like I asked?”

“For the millionth time, yes,” Methos said. “You know, just because I didn’t personally buy my last several residences doesn’t mean I didn’t live in them. I know what I like in an apartment. Besides, I thought you said this person was trustworthy. It’s not like she’s going to swindle us, is she?”

“Of course not!” Mac said, slightly offended. When had his friends ever betrayed him? …Okay, that was not a good rabbit hole to go down, especially with Methos. “Corinne has been selling me places to live in Paris for over a hundred years, but there’s still something to be said for planning ahead.”

“One hundred years at the same gig?”

“What can I say, the woman knows what she wants to do with her life.”

“No kidding.”

They weren’t late, and Corinne was nothing but helpful and pragmatic in her expertise as usual. Over the course of the day Duncan felt the twinge of anxiety about leaving his barge ease. He had forgotten about the other spaces in Paris, the nooks and crannies that had evolved over the past thirty years. It was like seeing the city for the first time again, this time with Methos at his side offering snide comments about good school districts and sincere questions about personal security and nosy neighbors. It made him feel young in a way he hadn’t felt since he met Tessa, like he had his whole life ahead of him.

But according to Methos the day was a complete disaster. An opinion he bemoaned loudly as they walked into Joe’s bar. Joe, looking ever the native elderly Parisian in a cap and neckerchief, immediately poured them both beers before Methos could even say another word. As far as Duncan knew they were the only customers he still waited on specifically, usually preferring to let one of his employees handle orders while he let his old bones rest.

“I’m serious Joe, a complete disaster,” Methos groaned over his mug of beer. Joe met Duncan’s eyes for verification and all he could do was shrug. Disaster was certainly an overstatement, but ultimately they had spent all day trudging through the cold of Paris without settling on anything. When Mac liked the layout, Methos hated the neighborhood, when Methos liked the view, Duncan couldn’t stand the building restrictions. They just couldn’t agree, which wasn’t exactly unusual. At least this time Duncan found the argument more entertaining than soul-sucking.

“I don’t remember house hunting being this hard!”

 “That’s probably because you haven’t done it yourself in a century. Everything’s easy when you can pay someone to do it for you,” Duncan said, sharing another look and a laugh with Joe that Methos refused to dignify. “Besides, it wasn’t completely terrible. That little place near St. Michel was very nice, even you said so.”

“And way too close to Shakespeare and Co.” Methos put in. “Anybody could recognize me around there.”

“Well, Methos, technically anybody could recognize you anywhere in the world. What with the kids and their digital media nowadays, some jokester could take your picture on the street and make that nose of yours a cultural meme. Ellis Marks’s less attractive clone,” Joe said, his eyes twinkling in the way only an old man’s could. “You think you of all people would know that.”

“Well that was hardly nice,” Methos muttered into his beer.

“Sorry, am I not supposed to bring up the whole tech-mogul life anymore? Did that joke go down with Ellis Marks’s plane?” Joe asked, pouring another beer for himself and Duncan.

“I meant the thing about the nose. You know I _can_ be quite sensitive.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, buddy,” Joe snorted, and that’s why Duncan loved mortals. He had to adapt to the phrases, the cadences, the slang at every turn if he wanted to fit in. No matter what, he had to appear thirty even if he was four hundred and twenty-eight. But Joe would always be allowed to sound like when he came from.

“Don’t worry, Methos, I like your nose,” Duncan said, grinning and pressing a sloppy kiss to said proboscis.

“Thank you, Duncan,” Methos replied drily, wiping the bit of saliva off the tip of his nose.

“But if it helps,” Joe continued, “we stopped using the bookstore as a front six… maybe seven years ago. It was getting a little too obvious,” he explained at Duncan’s inquiring look. “Independent bookstores aren’t exactly the most discreet or subtle places anymore.”

“Hmmm.” Methos took another sip of his beer, mulling Joe’s words over. “What’s become of the shop then?”

“Sold it off, but the new owners still sell books,” Joe shrugged. “You really never swing by?”

“Never. I was an early adopter of the kindle. Also I don’t enjoy visiting ex-colleagues who tried to kill Duncan.”

“Well, you have more to worry about from the Watchers in most other parts of the city – or the continent for that matter,” Joe said thoughtfully. “Not a lot of Immortals in Paris at the moment, frankly.” Joe tactfully didn’t mention the fact that as long as Methos remained with Duncan there would always be at least one Watcher about.

A Watcher that Duncan didn’t even know, as ever since Joe had given up field duty they had agreed that there was some information he shouldn’t have access to. Though he had the sneaking suspicion that his Watcher never stayed with him long before being reassigned somewhere else, and that Joe had a hand in that particular rotating door. And that maybe Methos had been the one to push Joe to it.

“Probably the damned economy drove them out, no room for ambition here,” Methos muttered, which was such a mundane worry to hear from the lips of the world’s oldest man that Duncan burst out laughing. “What? I can’t have opinions?”

“I’ve been listening to your opinions all day, I know you have plenty. I just never realized the French economy would ever be one of them.” Duncan looked at Joe to share another private joke, but he could see the old man’s head was beginning to droop, and his eyes were getting heavy. That’s right, old people don’t usually stay up this late. Joe’s wife had probably gone to bed an hour ago. Mac’s heart grew soft with the fondness he only felt towards mortals. “We better head home,” he said, jerking his head at Joe to get Methos’s attention.

“Right. Yeah. Long day.” Methos quickly downed the rest of his beer. “Have a good night, Joe,” he said, putting a friendly hand on Joe’s shoulder.

“Good night you two,” Joe yawned, “Better luck tomorrow.”

“You take care of yourself.”

Duncan wrapped his scarf tighter and pulled his cap firmly over his ears as soon as they stepped outside, the wind and the snow having picked up in the past hour. When he looked over and saw Methos’s scarf still untied he couldn’t stop himself from reaching over and securing it.

“I’m not going to get sick, you know.” Methos said, clearly amused at Duncan’s fussing, but not stopping him.

“I know,” Duncan replied, pulling Methos close again and setting off home. He could feel Methos shivering slightly next to him; he had never been good with the cold. Duncan always privately wondered if he had come from somewhere in the desert all those years ago, even if his pale skin spoke to somewhere farther north, but Methos said he didn’t remember and that’s something Duncan never doubted.

“Is Joe the reason you want to stay in Paris?” Methos asked only a few minutes later. Duncan blinked and paused, looking at Methos curiously but only getting a shrug in response. “He’s getting older, you don’t have long to spend with him. Maybe another decade or two at best, if you’re very lucky. I just thought, maybe you’d want to make sure you were here for it all.”

“He’ll be touched to know you’re so worried about him,” Duncan said as he started to walk again. It was too cold to stay outside for long.

“You know that’s not what I meant. It’s okay if he’s the reason you want to stay in Paris, you can tell me. I won’t be jealous or anything,” Methos said with a smile, and Duncan chuckled slightly at the thought. Not that Joe was any less handsome for being old, only he was… Joe.

“No, that’s not why, though it is a benefit now that I think about it.” Joe _was_ getting older, and Duncan certainly cared for him, but… “I’m not exactly Joe’s whole life anymore, and he’s not mine. I wanted to be in Paris because it felt right for me.”

“For you?”

“Well, for us.”

“How so?” They stopped walking again, and Methos was standing in front of him, his eyes looking into Duncan’s own as they patiently waited for an answer, while snowflakes accumulated on his shoulders. Duncan’s mind ran through the list of possible answers: the history, the accessibility, the culture, his job, his life. But deep down he knew there was only one right answer.

“Paris is a city for being in love,” Duncan replied simply, as if that was all there was to it. Which, really it was.

“Are you in love with me, Highlander?” Methos asked. His eyes glittered just like Joe’s had in the bar, full of the mischief and care and understanding that only comes with age. He was teasing, but it was also an honesty inquiry. After all they had gone through, after the years of chasing and scratching and shouting and kissing and just _being_ , did Duncan love him?   

Duncan smiled, his lips stretching so wide it almost hurt, and then leaned in and kissed Methos hard on the mouth.

His lips were cold but they warmed up quickly. Duncan had learned a long time ago that the technique of the kiss was never quite as important as the feelings behind the kiss. He had never been a particularly eloquent man, but he knew how to make a kiss talk, and for the next several minutes he just repeated _I love you I love you I love you_ with the flick of his tongue and the push of his lips and the pull of his teeth. This was, thankfully, a language Methos was more or less fluent in.

“We’d better get home before we freeze to death and are found tomorrow stuck to the sidewalk,” Duncan finally said. “I’d hate to have to flee Paris now of all times.”

“I’m not cold,” Methos said even though he was shivering, but it could have been from something other than the temperature, Duncan supposed.

They took their time walking home in silence, bumping companionably into each other along the way, each touch sending a spark of pleasure and a wave of warm feelings through Duncan’s body. Passing along the familiar steps of the Seine he couldn’t help but see memories everywhere he turned. Tessa laughing with her arms full of groceries, LeBrun pacing nervously, Richie riding up on his bike. He saw himself seeking solace after Tessa’s death, running from the rage of Ahriman, walking home with Methos for the first time after taking Kalos’s head. He looked to the brilliance of Notre Dame that never faded, not all these hundreds of years.

Sometimes these ghosts haunted Duncan, made it hard to turn the corner and harder still to breathe, but now they just felt like a kind reminder or a gentle blessing. It was Paris that was his home, not necessarily the barge. His past was with him wherever he walked. His bones remained the same.

As soon as the door to the barge was closed they were already stripping off their clothes. Duncan shrugged out of his coat and kicked off his pants and backed a mostly naked Methos onto the bed while simultaneously taking off his socks.

“Smooth,” Methos laughed.

“Yeah, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” Mac said before leaning down and kissing Methos’s nose and cheeks, all still red with the cold. He worked his way down Methos’s neck and onto his chest, now flushed red with arousal. He dragged his teeth lightly across Methos’s ribcage in a way that always made him squirm, then pressed light kisses onto his stomach.

“If you’re trying to impress me you could try a little hard... ahh…” Methos’s words were cut off with a moan as Duncan took him into his mouth. Giving pleasure was always better than taking it, he thought. Not that he would say no to being on the receiving end, but a large part of what made sex enjoyable to Duncan was what he could do for other people. “Duncan, no, Duncan I…” Methos breathed a sigh of relief as Mac let him go and then pulled him up so they were face to face.

“Together?” Duncan asked, and Methos nodded.

“Yeah, together.”

Methos had always been much tenderer in bed than Duncan would have suspected when they first met. Maybe it’s because he was used to mortals and had a lingering fear of their fragility, maybe it was an expression of some core essence of Methos, as seed of the man he had been five millennia ago before he died for the first time and the years heaped all of their burdens on his back. Duncan didn’t know, and he supposed Methos was unaware of it. But sex him was soft – not slow, or boring, just soft and bright like morning sunshine, no matter how hard they fucked.

“Methos,” Duncan’s voice caught in his throat as Methos thrust upward, and he shifted from where he was straddling the other Immortal to accommodate him. God.

“Gods,” Methos whispered as a line of sweat ran down his forehead. On impulse Duncan leaned forward and licked it away, more to save it from falling into Methos’s eyes than anything else, but there were other effects. “Jesus, Duncan, what the… fuck…” Methos’s last word came out as a moan as Duncan moved again on top of him again, lifting his hips slightly before pushing back down.

“You’ll have to learn to be a bit quieter once we have neighbors,” Duncan warned with a smiled.

“I don’t give a fuck about the neighbors,” Methos shot back as he gripped onto Duncan’s waist and thrust up again, and Duncan’s laughter was soon cut off in similar fashion.

They moved together until they were spent and sweaty and done, curled up on the used sheets and breathing hard. Methos undid Duncan’s bun and ran and hand through his long hair, the motion soothing and lowering his heart rate. Tessa used to do the same thing when he was worried. The barge swayed gently beneath them, and if Duncan closed his eyes he could picture her there, but he didn’t want to do that.

At some point they got up and changed the sheets and washed off, at some point Duncan prepared a plate of fruit and cheese and two glasses of wine, at some point he found himself half asleep with Methos’s head resting on his chest, his hair sticking up and tickling Duncan's nose slightly. It was routine, but there was comfort in the routine, not complacency or spite – not like before.

“Why do you really want to leave the barge?” He asked, his mind tired enough and his confidence in their relationship strong enough to give voice the question he’d been wondering for days. “Is it… is it because of Tessa? Because I bought the boat for her?” After five seconds of silence Duncan wondered if Methos had already fallen asleep, but then he shook his head slowly and sighed.

“You never thought that maybe I just really don’t like boats?” Methos asked, his words slow and drowsy. “Because I don’t. I’ve told you that before.”

“Yes you have, several times in fact, but what’s the real reason?” Mac asked, poking lightly at Methos’s side.

“I’m surprised you managed to go this long without asking me. You deserve a prize.”

“I’ll settle for an answer.”

“It’s not because of Tessa, I promise you that. Or, well, not in the way you think.” Methos huffed a soft laugh against Duncan’s chest. “I wish I could have met her, actually. Is that crazy?”

“No, she was wonderful.”

“Yeah. Anyways, no. She’s… I know that she’s a part of this place for you, but if you were ready to give her up then you were ready to leave.”

“So it was a test?” the thought was annoying and mildly alarming, but Duncan did his best to keep his voice calm while he waited for an answer. It was something he had been working on recently. Something they had been trying to do together.

“No!” Now Methos was the one who sounded alarmed, and he finally lifted his head to look at Duncan, his hazel eyes wide and his body suddenly tense. “That’s not what I meant. I’m just… sorry that I didn’t consider your possible feelings more beforehand.”

“Oh. Thank you,” Duncan said, and was surprised how much he meant it. He ran a hand down Methos’s bare back, the skin hot to the touch. “But I still don’t have an answer.”

“It was about… Oh I guess you could say it was about putting down some roots together. It was about proving I could meet you half-way. Satisfied?” Methos crossed his arms and turned his face back down into Duncan’s chest, nuzzling into his chest hair despite his feigned annoyance. Duncan continued stroking his back as he put Methos’s words through his head, trying to decode them from the language only Methos seemed to speak sometimes.

“You wanted to start a life together,” Duncan said slowly, “half me and half you.”

“Yes, exactly!” Methos lit up, apparently pleased that Duncan understood him so well. It had only taken a couple weeks this time, he was getting better. “And it didn’t feel right to just buy in on the barge. I didn’t want to take away something that was yours, I wanted to make something that was ours.” That’s why Methos had agreed to the realtor, Duncan realized, that’s why he allowed Paris despite the weather and the risk. It had to be half-Duncan or else it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t mean anything. “Also I really don’t like boats. I cannot stress that enough.”

It was a level of commitment Duncan had dreamed of getting from the often wayward and wanderlust driven Methos, and now that he had it he wasn’t sure what to say. It wasn’t a ring exactly, or even a vow necessarily. It wasn’t binding in any legal way – who knew where they would be living in five years? But for now it was a promise that Methos would come back to him. He would come back home. And, for now, that was more than enough.

“You’re quite the romantic,” Duncan said, his voice thick with emotion.

“I am, thank you for noticing,” Methos reached up and kissed Duncan on the forehead, “I love you too, you know that.”

“I do.” They did nothing but kiss until they fell asleep, and despite all the possible problems and fears of the future, Duncan fell asleep smiling.

Three weeks later saw them signing the paperwork for the apartment in St. Michel, even though Methos did complain about it intermittently.

“If I get noticed, Mac, it’ll be on your head.”

But Joe made the case pretty well, and ultimately Methos had never really been able to leave behind the scholarly part of him that loved the Latin Quarter, even if the neighborhood itself had changed drastically over the years. The subject of the bookstore came up once more, and elicited a particular entrepreneurial gleam in Methos’s eye that was maybe a little worrying, but Duncan could wait to see what happened.

“Well?” Methos asked, staring at the open door of the apartment that was now theirs. Their apartment. Theirs. Plural.

“Well what?” Duncan asked back, staring down the hallway of their new life together and wondering how soon he could get to work on changing the wallpaper.

“Aren’t you going to carry me across the threshold?”

“Why don’t you carry _me_?” Duncan asked, draping himself across Methos’s shoulders.

“You weigh a good fifty pounds more than I do,” Methos said, trying to extract himself from Duncan’s bear hug with very little luck.

“We could change that, you’re welcome to hit the gym with me. Pack on that muscle.” Duncan whispered into his ear, and wasn’t surprised at the way Methos smacked his arm at the suggestion.

“Not likely,” Methos heaved out a sigh and finally gave up trying to get out of Duncan’s grip. The two of them stood tangled together and rooted to the spot, waiting for the other one to make the first move. “Fine,” Methos said, not breaking free of Duncan’s arms but walking in order to move them both forward. “We’ll just walk in together.”

“Okay.”

So they did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I'm finally done with my first (and hopefully not my last as I have ideas but who knows) foray into the world of Highlander fic. I have had a great time writing it, and I hope you have enjoyed it.  
> There were a lot of things I wanted in this fic that I couldn't find the space or relevance for, like the fact that Methos's new name in this chapter is Victor, or expanding more on the role of Gabe between the two of them, or how Amanda bought an island, or Methos's rollercoaster ride of founding a tech company. Maybe some of these things will pop up in future fic.  
> I hope I did them all justice. I'm not sure if I did, but I hope so.  
> If you ever want to talk to me about Highlander headcanons (because i could talk about immortal lifestyle choices for days) then drop me a line on tumblr, it's my ao3 url without the underscores, and my delightful highlander tag is #there can be only one highlander tag
> 
> Anyways by again for now.

**Author's Note:**

> so yup, hah, first time writing in this fandom - which is intimidating because it's a pretty old fandom


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